Crazypants for the Carving Thing

Okay, so maybe I went a little crazypants, but I'm jumping into this woodcarving thing with both feet.  I bought the books and I bought the tools. I've ordered the stuff* I'll need for designing what I will eventually carve - charcoal pencils, tracing paper, carbon paper.  All in all, I've spent about $135 on this so far.  Thank goodness I don't need to buy wood.

I already have several pieces of fine wood set aside.  I have the dogwood and the lilac pieces, loads of cedar, and some smaller black cherry set aside.  There's a persimmon tree that needs to be dug out of one of our wood piles, which I'll do today.  Years ago**, I also set aside a few pieces of unidentified wood that I hope will make excellent walking sticks.  Oh, and there's the beaver wood I've collected.  I kinda know what I'm going to do with the beaver wood, even if I don't know exactly what kind of wood each of the pieces are.  

If all of this works out, I will start selling pieces.  That is obviously down the road.  I don't expect to start cranking out saleable goods immediately.  Hell, I'm half-afraid I won't turn out anything that doesn't look like crap... ever.  

There's also the distinct possibility that I will be limited by my already crappy hands.  Man, they're hurting this morning and I didn't even do anything to irritate them.  (Other than typing this post.  Blerg.)  How I'll handle using them to push sharp metal through wood remains to be seen.  

But I'm gonna try.  

All I know right now is that I'm excited about doing this and that's a good feeling.  It's been a while since I was this excited about any endeavor.  (Probably like 11 years... which is how long it's been since I started my self-publishing journey.)  

I guess the big hope is that I'll bleed some of my visual creativity onto the wood.  I used to be really into creating art.  Hell, I took 4 years of art classes in HS and one in college.  I ought to be able to do something, even after all these years.

Not sure if I'll continue to detail my carving journey here, or create another blog.  :shrug:  Time will tell.  Wish me luck.

*All ordered stuff is due to be here by Saturday, so I have plenty of time to start practicing carving before I get into design.

** which tells you how long I've been thinking about doing this.

Marketing Monday - Accidental Death

Since DE did so well last week, I thought I'd try marketing Accidental Death.  First book... second book... :shrug:  Anyway, there ya are...

Murder doesn't happen here. Starting today, ACCIDENTAL DEATH is free. (Always free with Kindle Unlimited.) Get your copy of this small-town, noir mystery today! https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00XM6VJ9U

I hope you enjoy it.  

Sunday Update - 2026 Week 8

Well, we're bombing the hell out of Iran.  Yay.  The Ayatollah is dead.  Also yay.  We're hitting military targets, those fuckers are hitting civilian targets.  Not so yay and also proof that what we're doing needs to be done to completion and not half-assed like the Gulf War.  The good people of Persia are happy we're doing what we're doing.  Anyone not happy can go pound sand.  But they better do it fast before we turn it into glass.  Glass up your ass.  :gigglesnort:

Anyway, my life...

No writing or editing.  I'm not sure when I'll do that again, but I'm not calling it quits, so the blog title stays.  I did some marketing, which for some reason took off like a rocket and garnered me some sales.  I finished February with 17.16 books sold for $29.76.  Not big money, but better than a sharp stick, so I'm happy.  And I've already got page reads this morning so my March dashboard doesn't look like a ghost town.  I'm not sure which book I'll pimp tomorrow, so stay tuned.

I read two books on wood carving this week.  One on whittling and the other a more comprehensive volume.  I'm also slowly making my way through The Flight of the Falcon by Daphne duMaurier.  

No baking.

Activity... It was a busy week for me.  I did something active 5 out of 7 days.  Early in the week, when it was still cool, I worked in the woods.  Other days, I did cleaning projects.  One day I did gardening.  I surprised myself by actually discovering visible biceps.  Woot, I have muscles again!  Unfortunately, I also ate like a horse this week, so... Weight: 177.2  =op

My wood carving hobby is getting exciting.  Like I said, I read two books about it, and since my tools arrived on Friday, I can now get started learning by doing - which is my preferred way to learn anyway.  

As for gardening, I moved all my baby trees outside.  I also filled pots with dirt and I'm ready to plant carrot seeds.  I'll be ready to plant potatoes once I cut my starter spuds into quarters, dry those cut edges, and buy more dirt.  All things in their own time, I guess.  I'll also be planting tomatoes once the local store starts carrying seedlings.  Oh, and I have three green pepper plants that made it through the winter in my spare room, so those'll be going into pots and outside once the weather is guaranteed to not turn to freezing.  

All in all, life is pretty good here.  I'm busy-busy, even if it's not writing related, and I'm okay with that.  (Not super-okay, otherwise, I wouldn't feel the need to go on and on about it, but okay enough for now.)

How are things in your world?

Thursday This n That

Yesterday, I got a wild hair to mop the smoking porch floor.  First, I had to vacuum, then I had to move all the furniture to one side, then I mopped.  Wait for it to dry, repeat with the other side.  Yes, I'm paying for it today.  Even though Hubs did help move furniture.  Ah, well, it looks nice and it smells good.  Murphy's Oil Soap for the win.

Today, it's a Wallyworld trip.  I need groceries, but I also need a new coffee maker.  This one isn't dead yet, but it's on its last legs.  And I need a new phone.  This one is only holding a charge for about a 45 minute call and I like to talk to Mom for about an hour.  It's really annoying when it starts its low-battery beep before I'm done talking.

Dollar General ice cream is better than Walmart ice cream.  There, I said it.  And I mean it.

I'm really getting jazzed about my new wood carving hobby.  My tools are supposed to be here tomorrow.  Yay.  Yesterday, I researched wood while I was waiting for the floor to dry.  Turns out cedar is excellent to carve, which is good because we have A LOT of cedar.  Yay.  I'll practice on that before I dive into the better woods.  I'm thinking about carving beavers on my pieces of beaver-chewed wood.  I know that a little obvious, but it works for me.

DE is still flying off the shelves.  I'm up to 562 downloads.  And now I'm seeing page reads, so there's another yay.

Hubs made me dinner last night, bless his heart.  I was bushed.  

When is Easter?  :googles:  Sunday, April 5th.  Whew, I don't need to think about it for another month.  Not that we do anything special, except dinner.  Easter dinner is always a thing.

We've been watching Killing Eve.  Yeah, I'm probably the last person to watch it.  I had to wait until it was free, so there's that.  Anyway, it's really good so far.  Although, it seems to me that Sandra Oh is just making Eve be Christine Yang as a spy rather than a surgeon.  :shrug:  I'm okay with that.  I liked Yang.  We also found a neat medical drama called Monroe.  It's kinda like House, but Monroe is nicer and he has a brogue.  Love me some Irish brogue.

Okay, I should probably get off my butt and do my shopping.  Have a great day wherever you are.  :hugs:

Jumping Numbers

I'm not sure exactly what happened yesterday.  I was doing my usual thing, posting to FB groups - 1 every fifteen minutes to avoid getting my paddies smacked by FB's gulag rules - when I noticed an uptick in downloads.  I was all like 'whoa' because in a short time, I'd moved like 20 copies.  Cool, thinks I.

But it didn't stop there.  The numbers kept rising...  throughout the rest of the day and night, as a matter of fact.  I'd moved 12 copies on Monday.  As of this morning, I've moved 463 copies of Dying Embers in 24 hours.

Of course, all of those are free, but it gives me hope that at least some of those people will read it and go on to order FG and EG.  (One person already did order the other two books at full price, so I've got that going for me.)  I also have hope that it has brought DE high enough up in the rankings that the KU people will see it and start reading the book, too.  Every page read adds up there.  

I'm just a little dumbfounded.  I've had this happen a couple times before.  TTW got a boost somehow and moved like 100 copies in one day.  Still, I've never had a book move this much in this short a time since I paid ENT for an ad.  

Anyway, it's pretty exciting.  I'd share the magic with you, if I knew what the magic was.  I know yesterday I tried something different and hit the specialized FB groups (thriller, suspense type groups) with ads.  Maybe that was the cause of the initial jump and, once DE started to rise in the rankings, that took over.  Maybe I have a fairy god-newsletter that advertises my books without me knowing or paying for it.  Either way, it does feel good to see the numbers jump like that.  

Doesn't change anything with regard to yesterday's post, but still...

The Carving Spectacle?

I've said this before and I'll probably say it again at some point in my life, but I'm not sure right now why I still call this blog 'The Writing Spectacle'.  Lord knows I haven't been writing or even editing much lately.  I'm not saying I will never write again, but it's not looking good right now.  

Right now?  Well, I'm getting all jazzed about wood carving.  As I might've mentioned a couple hundred times, I live in the woods.  We have about two and a half acres of mixed growth woods - hard and soft woods, deciduous and evergeen.  All that wood is begging me to do something with it.  

Sure, lots of it is for burning.  But it doesn't all have to be burned.  This is especially true of the special woods.  I'm talking dogwood and redbud and persimmon, and one case, lilac.  Why burn it when I can make it into something pretty?

Of course, I have no clue about carving anything right now.  To that end, I bought a book on whittling (the easiest of the wood carving methods).  I received that yesterday and it's pretty short.  I read it and learned a little bit, but it's not quite what I'm aiming for.  To that end, I ordered a better book on wood carving and... :drumroll:... a set of wood carving tools.  They'll be here Monday.  

Now, because I'm kinda weird, I've already been collecting interesting wood.  I have several pieces of beaver-chewed wood, and some wood that I thought would make excellent staves.  I also have a couple of root balls - cedar and dogwood - that looked like they might be interesting to carve something.  Now that I'm actually going to do the carving stuff, I added some dogwood that the fallen sycamore killed.  I can't wait to dig into that stuff.

Being a total novice, though, I'm going to start by carving cedar.  We have TONS of cedar.  It's not really great for burning in a woodstove, so it's in various piles around the property.  I can use that to practice on.  (I think.  I'm still learning which woods carve best.  If nothing else, it'll be a learning experience.)

The main thing right now, I guess, is teaching myself to carve without losing a finger or winding up with stitches and a bunch of really interesting scars.  Fingers crossed while I still have them.  ;o)

The writing?  It's still there.  I'm still working on editing Duke Noble #3, here and there when the mood strikes me.  The problem is that the mood is striking me less and less.  Maybe it'll get better this summer.  One can hope, right?

Marketing Monday - Dying Embers

Here we are again at Monday, which means marketing.  I even got up early to get after it, but then I got distracted :cough:facebook:cough:, so here we are at 6 o'clock and I'm just getting started.  Derp.

Anyway...

Revenge is better hot. Starting today, get DYING EMBERS absolutely free. Pick up your copy of this gripping and gritty suspense today! https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TEQK7OU