Category: Write, Write, You Bloody Well Write

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Home Base Write, Write, You Bloody Well Write

The Raider Record, Vol. 22 #7

Raider Record Vol. 22 #7It’s time once again to dip into the ’80s and revisit another issue of the Raider Record, the junior high school paper of which I was copy editor between 1985 and 1987. As always, you can find every issue from that period scanned in PDF form here, or you can view or download this specific issue here. Going through and scanning these, lots of memories came bubbling up to the surface, so I thought it would be entertaining to record those for posterity here. … Read more

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Cooking With Code Write, Write, You Bloody Well Write

Contact re-established

Let's go Iron Man!In 2011, Amazon.com cut off all of its affiliation agreements with affiliates in several states, as a response to those states pushing for laws that would force Amazon to collect state sales tax in those states. This action was a calculated effort to get the affiliates to put pressure on their state legislatures to rescind the bills in question, but as many Amazon affiliates are either small businesses or sites run by individuals, Amazon didn’t get the result expected. If collecting the taxes in question made business impossible to do in those states, Amazon would’ve stopped shipping things to Arkansas and the other states in question, but of course they didn’t. That would affect the bottom line. Can’t have that.

theLogBook.com had been an Amazon affiliate since the late 1990s, which was really the point at which it went from “disorganized fan site” to “somewhat more focused site that can make a bit of money”. Then there came a tipping point at which the site was legitimately paying its own bills – the costs of hosting, the domain name, bandwidth, even my internet connectivity at home, were all being paid for by the site. This justified expansion of the site and the time spent on it, and led to a few “boom years” where content seemed to increase nearly exponentially. That had to slow down substantially when my first child arrived, but it was still worth spending time on. When Amazon cut all of its Arkansas affiliates off in 2011, myself included, it was like losing a limb. What point was there in generating more material for the site when it was no longer going to pay its own bills? Indeed, the money to buy the things frequently covered here – DVDs, music, and so on – ran out. The emphasis rapidly changed: it was time for that Doctor Who book I’d been working on at a slow burn for several years to come to the front burner in a hurry. The kind of content I could charge for was the only kind that there was any justification to work on.

Now, thanks to a change in federal law, Amazon is required to collect state sales tax nationwide…and without announcing it to anyone, they’ve re-opened the doors of their affiliate program to sites in those states they once spurned. Here’s what that means at theLogBook. … Read more

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Home Base Write, Write, You Bloody Well Write

The Raider Record, Vol. 22 #6

Raider Record Vol. 22 #5It’s time once again to dip into the ’80s and revisit another issue of the Raider Record, the junior high school paper of which I was copy editor between 1985 and 1987. As always, you can find every issue from that period scanned in PDF form here, or you can view or download this specific issue here. Going through and scanning these, lots of memories came bubbling up to the surface, so I thought it would be entertaining to record those for posterity here. … Read more

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Write, Write, You Bloody Well Write

Let’s talk books

Because that’s something I seldom bring up here, right? Except…there have been a few changes to the schedule.

VWORP!3With Peter Capaldi announcing that he is not only leaving, but his final episode will be this year’s Christmas special, VWORP!3 will be gaining a subtitle along the lines of “The Capaldi Years” and has slid back to January 2018. In line with the rethink of the WARP! series, VWORP!3 will be a thinner book that its predecessors, and it’ll cover four main topics:

  • The Peter Capaldi era on TV
  • Class
  • Big Finish audios featuring new series Doctors (10th Doctor stories, War Doctor stories)
  • Big Finish audios featuring other new series characters (UNIT, Churchill, Torchwood)
… Read more
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Home Base Write, Write, You Bloody Well Write

The Raider Record, Vol. 22 #5

Raider Record Vol. 22 #5It’s time once again to dip into the ’80s and revisit another issue of the Raider Record, the junior high school paper of which I was copy editor between 1985 and 1987. As always, you can find every issue from that period scanned in PDF form here, or you can view or download this specific issue here. Going through and scanning these, lots of memories came bubbling up to the surface, so I thought it would be entertaining to record those for posterity here. … Read more

Categories
Home Base Write, Write, You Bloody Well Write

The Raider Record, Vol. 22 #4

Raider Record Vol. 22 #4It’s time once again to dip into the ’80s and revisit another issue of the Raider Record, the junior high school paper of which I was copy editor between 1985 and 1987. As always, you can find every issue from that period scanned in PDF form here, or you can view or download this specific issue here. Going through and scanning these, lots of memories came bubbling up to the surface, like the fizz atop a freshly-poured glass of New Coke, that I thought would be entertaining to record for posterity here. … Read more

Categories
Home Base Write, Write, You Bloody Well Write

The Raider Record, Vol. 22 #3

Raider Record Vol. 22 #3It’s time once again to dip into the ’80s and revisit another issue of the Raider Record, the junior high school paper of which I was copy editor between 1985 and 1987. As always, you can find every issue from that period scanned in PDF form here, or you can view or download this specific issue here. Going through and scanning these, lots of memories came bubbling up to the surface, unbidden, that I thought would be entertaining to record for posterity here. … Read more

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Home Base Write, Write, You Bloody Well Write

The Raider Record, Vol. 22 #2

And so it continues.

Raider Record

Raider RecordTo get the meat and potatoes out of the way – you can now download all of the 1985-87 Raider Record issues in PDF form from this page, or you can just look at or downloaded this issue here. Since the previous installment of this series was so well received, in addition to the catch-all page with every issue, I’ll post whatever scattered memories I’m able to dredge up from the dark and dreary recesses of my mind on each issue’s anniversary. … Read more

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Home Base Write, Write, You Bloody Well Write

The Raider Record, Vol. 22 #1

And so it begins.

Raider Record

Okay, rewind a bit. In the course of going through some folders and boxes I have been carrying around with me for decades, but haven’t gone through, I found treasure – namely, the entire two-year run of my junior high school newspaper during my tenure in eighth and ninth grade journalism class. All seriously yellowed Raider Recordand fragile, but all complete. The good and the bad, the inadequacies and the excesses of youth, are all really, really on display here. And unless I somehow turn up an old folder with hand-written missives and stories from grade school, this is the earliest record of me, or my lifelong friend and partner-in-crime Rob Heyman, as a writer.

To tell that story, one has to rewind a bit further. I understand that not everyone will really care about all the background, so let’s keep the meat & potatoes up front: right-click this link to download a PDF of this issue of the Raider Record, published exactly 31 years and a few days ago. The file is approximately 13 megs.

And now the backstory. … Read more

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Conventional Thinking Write, Write, You Bloody Well Write

Fatherhood, Fandom, Fading Out, and a Book Update

Fatherhood, Fandom and Fading OutSurprise! New book! And probably (with apologies to Steven Moffat) not the one you’re expecting. Fatherhood, Fandom, and Fading Out is a book of essays, largely culled from this very blawg as well as from theLogBook.com ‘Zine, though there are a few “previously unreleased bonus tracks” in the mix as well, and of course everything’s been modified so it works as a book. Watch for it later this week in theLogBook.com Store and Amazon.com.

So let’s talk books for a little bit, because I haven’t talked books in a while, and the last time I did talk books, this new one wasn’t even a gleam in my eye.

FFFO, as I’ve come to call it, is just a little bit of a stopgap project, something that will (hopefully) bring in a wee bit of scratch while I finish up working on the next book, which will be WARP!1, the first Star Trek guidebook in a format similar to my previous Doctor Who guidebooks, VWORP!1 and VWORP!2 (both still very much available in theLogBook.com Store, by the way). But it’s not a completely cynical, let’s-make-a-quick-buck thing. The element of the VWORP! books that has gotten more feedback than anything is the brief essays that offer much-needed detours from the synopsis/cast-and-crew/trivia/review format that is 90% of those books. The essays seem to connect with people – a lot. So an all-essay book was always in the offing; I simply decided to move it up in the schedule, just in time for Fathers’ Day no less, while I decided what to do about the WARP! books.

Because the playing field has changed a bit where WARP! is concerned. We now have a new Star Trek series in pre-production, with such luminaries as Bryan Fuller, Nicholas Meyer, and Rod Roddenberry doing the honors. After years of mega-budget popcorn flicks bearing little resemblance to the Star Trek we know and love, the idea of an all-star return to form is incredibly appealing…and it changes things up a lot. … Read more