Thank you to the five hundred and thirty brave people who downloaded my books over the weekend!

Self-publishing is a powerful tool for authors, and is the wave of the future.  The old publishing companies are middle-men who used to be the gate-keepers of who and what got published.  Their reign (maybe not of terror) is nearly over.  While a lot of what gets published may be so-called "vanity publishing," the future will be dominated by individual authors writing what they want to write, without the often stifling influence of large publishing houses, which have historically consumed most of the profit for their own benefit.  Especially in regards to e-book publishing, the new way of doing things is one in which an author...an artist, really...has the freedom to express him or herself, and present the written word to an audience in a way that is both more cost-effective to the consumer and at the same time environmentally conscious.  The hundreds of people who got to sample my work over the weekend did so without doing anything more than transmitting bits and bytes through the magic of the interweb...no trees were harmed in the creation and transmission of these histories and ideas.  Thanks, and bring on the future!

And Again: Spears, ancient but good.

Firearms and the Zombie Apocalypse...

So by now everyone has probably watched the season finale of "The Walking Dead," with the long-awaited prison assault.  While it didn't go down exactly as I'd expected, in important ways I feel like my analysis of the probable result was pretty spot-on.  If you've been following the things that I jot down on this blog, you'll know that I've written two different pieces about the concept of Woodbury attacking the Prison Kingdom of Rick.  You'll also know that I thought that Woodbury had about the same chance of success as successfully navigating an asteroid field in The Empire Strikes Back...except the Governor is no Han Solo, and his "ship" is certainly no Millennium Falcon.  In other words, a snowball's chance in Hell, as they say.

Most of this gut feeling came from the state of the Governor's army...I mean, the Governor's a psychopath, so he's not going to get scared of much, but his followers on the other hand...well, they leave a lot to be wished for.  They aren't (err, weren't) soldiers...just giving someone a weapon and telling them to follow you isn't the same thing as actually training and preparing them to fight.

In the end, the Governor's assault on the prison was broken with ridiculous ease.  All the defenders had to do was employ a few flash grenades, and along with some help from the dark nastiness of the tombs and a handful of hungry zombies panic spread like wildfire among the Governor's grand army.  A couple of bursts of automatic fire and the victorious horde was reduced to a terrified mass of speeding motorists, running for their lives back to Woodbury, even though they weren't even being pursued.  This is the response we should have expected from them (although I thought that a lot of more of them would be cut down in the process of extricating themselves from the prison...actually, did anyone actually get killed in the prison?  I remain unsure, despite the statement that the recent attack was a bloodbath, whilst the Governor was attempting to drive his minions back into the fray).

Now we can all wait hungrily for the next season of The Walking Dead.  The lesson we've learned from this season is that it's harder than it looks to attack a group of determined people who have a fortress to defend.  And also that Carl may be a serial killer.  And that Andrea should've shut her yap and used the pliers with the quickness, as it were...and many other things.

Forgive the production quality...this is my first foray in the high tech future that is YouTube...