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Showing posts from 2017

A Short Holiday Greeting and an Update on Us...

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My apologies for not posting much lately.  The day after I made the Thanksgiving post a very dear friend who'd been fighting cancer for over a year took a bad turn and we lost her a few days later.  She'd been a part of mine and Helen's lives for over 25+ years and had been like a sister to both of us.  We've been trying to help her husband who is back up in Sacramento (we're down in the Monterey Bay area) from a distance as best we can.  We've been limited in what we could do because Helen just started working with the county and is on 6 months probation and cannot take time off at will, plus she had to finish final exams for her college courses.  Now she's fighting Bronchitis as well which has made things more awkward for us.   Needless to say there hasn't been a lot of writing being done.  However, we are still releasing the anthology "The Vampyre Blogs - One Day At A Time" on January 5th (The Twelfth Night Of Christmas) as planned.  In

Thoughts of Gratitude This Thanksgiving Day...

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When it comes to being thankful my first thought every day is about having Helen in my life.  She's  my wife, my heart's desire, my collaborator, and especially my best friend.   But I have many other things I am grateful for starting with the day I was brought to Joyce and Gerard Krummenacker as a foster baby (the only one they ever kept), to this moment here before my computer.  Perhaps someday I'll share more of those personal tales, but on this day I simply want to focus on the past year.  In October of 2016, I got the call for an interview with the County of Santa Cruz and a week later I was offered the job.  I was still attending classes at CSU Monterey Bay at the time and had to sacrifice my GPA by going down in flames in two of them gradewise.  I could have simply dropped those classes but at the time we were living in campus subsidized housing and I was under the  impression that I still had to be a full-time student to keep that place so I bit the bu

New Thoughts and Insights About Collaborating...

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Yesterday I had an epiphany about my writing and the entire Para-Earth Series... it's been a collaboration all along.  From "The Bridge" to "The Ship" to "The Vampyre Blogs -Coming Home", the entire journey has been one gigantic collaboration with my wife/best friend Helen.  And I am planning on putting her name on the first two books.   Why didn't I do this sooner?  And how did I not realize it was a collaboration all along?  Because I thought a collaboration strictly meant two people were doing the actual writing, but that's not the only way a collaboration works.  Ideas, suggestions, helping shape characters, plot, settings, events... all of that goes into a collaboration as well.   So even though I did all the writing in "The Bridge" and "The Ship", Helen gave me so much guidance like helping shape the characters personalities, questioning their actions, being my sounding-board for ideas I had but didn't

Another Option For Those Writing On A Budget

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    I'm letting one of my co-authors take the helm here at the blog today.  So allow me to introduce one of my oldest friends and partner-in-crime Rich Caminiti, as he shares with you his own wisdom about writing on a budget.  Take it away, Rich...     Welcome my friends, and thank you to Allan for letting me write my piece for you. In his last musing, he spoke of his computer woes not only about his desktop but his laptop as well.       Well, I too seem to have shared the same fate. But wait, I'm getting to my point! I had to wait and pick up a new laptop which some of you may have seen my post about setting it up. (To a computer technician, to get this perfected to our satisfaction takes forever!)      When Allan needed Microsoft Office I surmise and Helen had told him about WPS Office which cost him nothing. A very excellent deal! Five second ad and all.      I also told my cohort that I could give him Office 2016 Pro for free, he thought about it

An Early Halloween Treat...

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A Halloween Tale is now available for perusal over at my other blog: The Vampyre Blogs - Private Edition. Come on over and enjoy a brief scare by clicking on the link below ... https://thevampyreblogs.blogspot.com/2017/10/a-halloween-tale-from-our-upcoming.html

Adventures with Computers Part II...

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We're going to continue our discussion about adventures with computers . When last I posted, I had just finished telling you all about the events involving the death of my little blue laptop and our desktop, and how we had just gotten around replacing them with refurbished computers.  In both cases, neither the new laptop nor the desktop had MS Office which meant no word processing program, excel, etc.  And since we were still on a budget purchasing would be more than a minor inconvenience at this point.  So what to do? Well, Helen had told me about WPS Office, a system that she had downloaded onto her laptop a year ago which is fully compatible with MS Office while costing $0.00 to download.  There is one caveat however, every time you open a file in WPS Office you have to put up with a 5 second ad before proceeding.  Right off the bat I was like, "I can handle a 5 second ad, and if that's all sign me up."  But then a second thought occurred to me.   

Adventures With Computers...

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Guess what? September has been quite the month for me and Helen.  Some of you may remember that about a month ago, my little blue laptop became... 'unreliable' to the point I dared not risk any of our stories on it.  So it was sent to the wayside, leaving only our desktop (which I could not bring to work of course) and Helen's laptop which she needs on a daily basis for her online college classes.  This put a serious dent in my ability to write or even be online as often as I wished, much less getting much writing done except on weekends.   We also had expenses to take care of, like college books for Helen which took priority over replacing my laptop.  Finally, things were looking up just on the eve of my weeklong vacation at the beginning of September when illness and car troubles reared their ugly heads and forced us to push the laptop purchase back even further.  After getting the car situation squared away (over the course of most of my vacation), our deskto

1st Sneak Peek Into Our Upcoming Anthology..

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The long wait to replace my now deceased laptop has unfortunately been extended due to circumstances beyond my control like, car registration, car repairs, books for my wife's college classes, etc.  Luckily I am on vacation this week, or rather a 'stay-cation' and am working hard to get our upcoming anthology edited and ready for beta-reading.  We hope to have this process completed by the end of this month.      In the meantime, with our time and resources being a little limited, we decided to offer the first sneak peek into the anthology itself.  We hope this peek will intrigue and delight you all, since it will be the first of several leading up to the day of the book's release. So without further ado, here is a snippet from the first of the twenty plus tales that will appear in the collection we call:   "The Vampyre Blogs - One Day At a Time" : FROM THE DESK OF CAPTAIN BRIAN WESTON OF THE UNION ARMY – June 30th, 1863  “A Letter To My Wife”

****Brand New 5-STAR Review Over On Amazon****

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5.0 out of 5 stars   "Favorite read this summer" BySimoneon August 16, 2017 Format: Kindle Edition Favorite read this summer! Filled with murder mysteries and British wittiness that kept me laughing all throughout the adventure. Haven't found a book with good dialogue and a sense of humor for a while. Overall, I'm pleased with the mix of romance + adventure + mystique put together in 'The Bridge'. Happy to see that there are writers who still put so much time and effort in to character development and story. Want to see more? Just click on the link below to read more reviews about "The Bridge" and the other books in our Para-Earth Series: Amazon:  https://www.amazon.com/Allan-Krummenacker/e/B00B1W8TEU/ref=dp_byline_cont_ebooks_1 AmazonUK:  https://www.amazon.co.uk/Allan-Krummenacker/e/B00B1W8TEU/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1?qid=1503776721&sr=8-1 Amazon Canada: https://www.amazon.ca/s/ref=dp_byline_sr_ebooks

THE PARA-EARTH SERIES… WHAT DOES THE FUTURE HOLD? - Part II

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         Hello everyone… when last I left you, I had promised to discuss some of the writing projects currently under way in the Para-Earth Series, and that is exactly what I intend to cover in this entry.           Currently there not one, not two but over seven books under construction so to speak.               Each is at a different stage of development as far as length, but all are still only 1 st drafts.   So there’s still a lot more to do on them, but progress is being made.   I’ll start with the book that will be released this coming November/December.  This one focuses mainly on my vampyre Nathan and his friends.  Before I released the first full-length novel starring Nathan last year, he and his friends had been the focus of a blog I started back in 2014 appropriately called “The Vampyre Blogs – Private Edition” (You can click this link to see the latest story: http://thevampyreblogs.blogspot.com/ ).   The purpose of the blog was to introduce readers to Na

THE PARA-EARTH SERIES… WHAT DOES THE FUTURE HOLD?

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In the last two years, so much has been changing for me when it comes to writing.  For starts, I completed my first collaborative work with my wife Helen, which became “The Vampyre Blogs – Coming Home”.  As I’ve said in previous entries, she has been my sounding board, my adviser on both science and science fiction, my rock, and my inspiration. Shortly before work was completed on the “The Vampyre Blogs – Coming Home”, a friend from high school days, Rich Caminiti, asked me to look at a piece he’d been working on for a number of years.  I read what he had done and quickly saw he was in the same boat I had been back in 2009-2011.  A story idea which needed some serious direction, scene cutting/editing, a little more cohesive connection between ideas… but a SOLID concept.  As we talked more, he asked me to help be his mentor and after having read my first two books he wished to know if we could work on a project together and I agreed.  Like Helen, Rich is a huge knowledg

PICK THIS UP IF YOU LIKE VAMPIRES!

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NEW 4 STAR REVIEW OVER ON AMAZON FOR OUR LATEST RELEASE...  PICK THIS UP IF YOU LIKE VAMPIRES! By Da Man on June 15, 2017 Format: Kindle Edition I received this book from the author in exchange for an honest review. Do not pick this book up if you think you know everything about vampires! It will completely change your thinking about them... Click on the link below to see the rest of the review and what others have been saying: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01MDO8SLO/ref=series_rw_dp_sw

Thoughts About Working on Multiple Books At the Same Time - Part II

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Sorry for the delay in posting this second section, but I’ve been having issues with the Kindle version of my first novel “The Bridge”.  Amazon has been alerted to the problem and are working hard with me to get the problem resolved.  I’ll be creating another post here sharing what happened and how we got things resolved shortly.   In the meantime, back to our discussion about working and juggling multiple stories… So where was I?  Oh yes, why finding that I could work on multiple stories was such a big deal for me.  Anyone who is creative will tell you that when you have that creative mindset going it gives them a surge of satisfaction that’s like no other.  Our minds love to be active and focused on something.  But for artists, writers, musicians, anyone who’s got a creative mind, not having the brain working on something can be frustrating.  You start to feel stale, or like you’re not doing your part somehow.  This is a big part of why writer’s block of any kind, can be