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Sunday, April 24, 2016

Sites - Reading

I overlooked my Twitter site. You can also follow me on Twitter.

I've been reading and trying to absorb some of the information about indie publishing and marketing that's contained in The Indie Author Power Pack, a three-book set covering the subject of indie publishing and marketing, etc. The books are Write, Publish, Repeat by Sean Platt and Johnny B. Truant; Let's Get Digital (2nd Ed.) by David Gaughran; and How to Market a Book (2nd Ed.) by Joanna Penn. It also contains some Exclusive Content on the subject.

This set has taken me about a month to go through and I'm not completely finished yet. It was slow going in some areas with a lot of detail, all worthwhile to someone trying to learn about indie publishing and marketing. I haven't been able to do any writing on my novel because of this and the usual day-to-day "busy" times, violating one of the rules of the set, which is write, write, write. I've picked up some pointers which I will try out with my new book when it is finished.

This isn't a review of the set, but I can see where it is going to be very helpful in my future writing and would have been on my books already out there, if I had only known.

I purchased the set on Amazon, the Kindle edition, about a year ago.

Sunday, April 17, 2016

Sights on Sites

I'm on the following sites:

Facebook

Linked-in

Pinterest

Send an e-mail to "ocase at cox.net" to join my sites or just go to each and look me up and be a friend. Be careful on Facebook. There is more than one with that name.

Enjoy the Springtime!

Sunday, April 10, 2016

Short Stories by Zane Grey

I read a couple of short stories by Zane Grey this week from a book entitled The Westerners Frontier Stories published in March 2000 by Five Star in Unity Maine.

The first story was The Ranger about a Texas Ranger who reminisces about life in the past and hopes for the future before he is ordered to find out what happened to Roseta Uvalde. He and others think that she either ran away or was kidnapped by the Mexican Quinela, the bandit and "friend" of Senor Uvalde. Tex Medill, the Ranger, knows Roseta and thinks at times that he could resign from the Rangers and marry her and settle down on a ranch of their own. Now, he has the task of finding her and bringing her home safely. Turns out that everyone was right about her disappearence, she did "go on a ride" with a cowboy acquaintance for fun, and she was kidnapped by the Quinela gang of outlaws while on the ride. Quinela wants her and hopes to get revenge on Uvalde for a past misdeed.

Medill is captured, too, by the gang and must use his brain and ranger experience to get free and save Roseta.   How he does this and brings Roseta back safely is a dangerous and difficult job and an exciting story by Mr. Grey. It is a fairly lengthy story, but that doesn't lessen the interest in it for me. I liked it.

The second story, Lightning, is almost as exciting as two brothers set out to capture the wild mustang that has been stealing horses from ranches. Lightning is a beautiful, grey horse with a long, white main that lives in Sevier County, Utah, in the cedars and forests of central Utah. How they go about capturing the animal makes for a fine outdoors story where they have to outsmart the animal. This story has no shoot-outs or gunfire to enliven it, but I really enjoyed reading it.

This book also contains a couple of unusual stories, one by Grey's son, Loren Grey, about whales. Not exactly western in nature, but very interesting. I will tell you about them when I get to 'em. 

Sunday, April 3, 2016

A Dusty Richards Novel, Ambush Valley

This novel has been my "waiting book", that is, it has been in my car waiting for me to read it while I wait for the wife to do her shopping. About every time she makes it back, I was caught up in the plot at an exciting place and had to put it away until the next time. It is one of the Byrnes Family Ranch   stories.

In this one, Chet Byrnes moves lock, stock, and barrel to Arizona from Texas. A year earlier he had gone to Arizona to check out the possibilities and found them pretty good. He bought a ranch in the Verde Valley and now he was ready to move in. He packed everything into wagons and took along some cowboy relatives and the family to supplement those in Arizona and settled in the Verde Valley. He was busier than a one-armed prospector digging for gold, buying a couple more ranches, chasing outlaws, and buying and selling cattle. When Chet was there before, he met Marge Stephenson and fell in love and they get married later on.

Dusty Richards paints a fine portrait of Chet Byrnes and family and all the problems that comes with running a cattle ranch, plus the other two ranches Byrnes acquires. The story moves right along with action mixed in with domestic plans. And like the other Dusty Richards stories that I have read, I enjoyed this one, too. The book is a Pinnacle pocket book in the First Edition printed in 2014.