Playstation Apologies

A short while back, I complained about the Playstation Network being down. It didn't function for quite a while, which was a bit frustrating. I’m not a premium member. I use the free access, so really what did I have to complain about? Hey, give me my free thing back? How does that sound?

Anyway, so the network appears to be completely back up. I had to change my password, which I finally did.

Sony sent an email a week or so ago with some apology gifts and wow, what they are offering is far more than I would have expected.

We get 100 free items on Playstation home. That’s their online community of gamers. You walk around and play games and talk to people and you have a house in which you can place furniture, etc. It’s pretty cool. The free items were clothes and some furniture and a couple of houses.

We also got two free games to download from the Playstation store, like actual full-length games. There are four to choose from. I haven’t gotten mine yet because I’m having a serious harddrive space problem. I need to upgrade my hard drive within the next couple of weeks or I am going to miss out.

Two free PSP games, also downloads. I don’t have a PSP but we were thinking about getting the boy one for his birthday. I would assume there is some way to transfer the games from Playstation to PSP.

30 days premium membership. I haven’t really played around with this too much. I know you can download game demos, which I can’t do, also due to hard drive problems.
Really, I didn’t expect Sony to do much of anything. This offer is so above and beyond. The sad thing is, it won’t be good enough for some people. Such is life and the way of our world.

Hey guess what! I’m going to a Black Keys concert tonight! WOO! It is outdoors. Hopefully I won’t have to dodge any bolts of lightning.

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Hey, want some free reading? Check out the fiction freebie page on this very blog!
There you shall find links to two free ebooks on Smashwords and novel excerpts on Scribd.

Other places to find me:
http://www.LeaRyan.com/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/LeaRyan1

book working

I did some major writing this past weekend. Over the course of three days, I wrote somewhere between 3000 and 4000 words, which is a lot for me. The husband worked some overtime. The daughter was gone all weekend. In other words, there was more quiet time than usual. The boy was around but he’s pretty quiet when his sister is gone, no one to fight with, I guess.

I had some good ideas for the remix project while I was writing too. I had a character telling a story about an event that happened to her years prior. As I was writing, I decided that I wasn’t feeling what she was saying. There was emotion, but it wasn’t powerful enough.

I cut all of that out. Instead of having her tell the story, I’m going to take a chapter or maybe two and actually develop and write out the whole story as a sort of flashback. I think it will be more vivid that way.

I’m listening to classical music as I’m typing, and my son just informed me that the music sounds like “George Washington songs”. LOL

Remix current word count - 44413

If I can keep writing at this pace, I may be able to finish the rough draft by the end of June, if not then, definitely by the end of July.

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Hey, want some free reading? Check out the fiction freebie page on this very blog!
There you shall find links to two free ebooks on Smashwords and novel excerpts on Scribd.

Other places to find me:
http://www.LeaRyan.com/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/LeaRyan1

movie: Drive Angry

Hellloooo! I'm so sorry to be away yesterday. I spent the entire evening figuring out how to and rooting my husband's Nook. It worked out reasonably well. No innocent electronics were killed or maimed.

We watched Drive Angry this weekend. A guy named Milton (played by King of Bad Hair, Nicolas Cage) returns from Hell to hunt down the satanic cult that murdered his daughter and kidnapped his baby granddaughter to use as a sacrifice to the devil.

In need of a ride, he finds Piper (Amber Heard) at a diner. She happens to be driving a badass '69 Charger. They get into some drama with her boyfriend and take off together.

A complication to the granddaughter retrieval mission is a man who calls himself the Accountant (William Fichtner!!). He is pursuing Milton (Cage) to take him back to Hell because, well, Hell's management doesn't really like it when the kiddies go wandering.

Fichtner's portrayal of The Accountant is the best part of this movie. You might remember him from Drowning Mona or more likely from Prison Break. The Accountant character is somehow serious and hilarious at the same time. He does the wildest, weirdest, cruelest things with this forever calm demeanor.

Drive Angry has a few cringe-worthy gore moments, some of them pretty darn cheesy. There's a lot of gunplay and sex and of course, abuse of the '69 Charger. The movie was entertaining. It gets a B-.

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Hey, want some free reading? Check out the fiction freebie page on this very blog!
There you shall find links to two free ebooks on Smashwords and novel excerpts on Scribd.

Other places to find me:
http://www.LeaRyan.com/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/LeaRyan1

gratuitous Moo

I have a cat. His name is Max. I sometimes call him Moo because he's black and white and his name starts with "M" and I like to give him nicknames. Here are some pictures of him.

I call this series - "Agh, hold still!"

I will now go type words.
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Hey, want some free reading? Check out the fiction freebie page on this very blog!
There you shall find links to two free ebooks on Smashwords and novel excerpts on Scribd.

Other places to find me:
http://www.LeaRyan.com/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/LeaRyan1

movie: Dragon Hunters

The kids and I watched a movie called Dragon Hunters. When I saw the title on the Netflix streaming menu, it looked like a How to Train a Dragon knockoff. I decided to compare the release dates and discovered that Dragon Hunters actually came out before How to Train Your Dragon. If anything How to Train your Dragon took cues from Dragon Hunters.

Here’s the description from Amazon: “Zoe is a little girl who believes in fairy tales. In order to help her uncle Lord Arnold get rid of a terrible dragon, Zoe decides she has to find some heroes. When she meets Gwizdo and Lian-Chu, a couple of two-bit, fly-by-night dragon hunters, she decides that she s going to believe in them and set out on an adventure to bring peace to the land.”

This is one of the best kids’ movies I’ve ever seen. It is so beautiful and surreal. Their world is literally falling apart. Chunks of it float into the sky throughout the film. The characters react to the instability with more sadness than fear most of the time.

Forest Whitaker lends his great baritone voice for the calm Lian-Chu. The other characters balance Lian-Chu with their enthusiasm – Zoe with her cheerleading and Gwizdo with his direction. There are no dull moments in the story. It is funny and filled with action.

This movie is seriously amazing. I don’t know how it snuck in under my radar. A

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Hey, want some free reading? Check out the fiction freebie page on this very blog!
There you shall find links to two free ebooks on Smashwords and novel excerpts on Scribd.

Other places to find me:
http://www.LeaRyan.com/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/LeaRyan1

indie review: Strength of a Giant, Tony Passarelli

Strength of a Giant, written by Tony Passarelli.

From the author: “Strength of a Giant is a short story about the enigmatic Son of God Emanuel and the Archangel Raphael. Will they be able to fight the evil plot of Jovian, who is an amalgamation of fallen angels, or has time run out? The final battle takes place within the Milky Way and our solar system will never be the same again. . .”

The quality of the writing is decent. The interesting concept, unique setting (angels in space!) and quick pace hold the reader's attention for the duration of the novellette. Given the length of the story, Emanuel's character was pretty well-developed.

The only issue I had was that I thought there could have been a more thorough setup to what was happening in the story, maybe some more elaboration on the angels as aliens business.

Also, there was a reference at the beginning of the story to The Book of Biden. I didn’t know what that was until I reread the e-mail from Tony with his About the Author (below). Before rereading his e-mail, I googled The Book of Biden and all the links that came up were about the US Vice President’s book.

All in all, it was a unique and enjoyable read.

About the Author
Tony Passarelli lives in Nottingham, England.

He spent many years working as an
independent film-maker. In the process he
wrote a number of film scripts which kindled
his interest in becoming a novelist.

'Strength of a Giant' is his first completed work.

Tony is currently working on his fantasy novel
'The Book of Biden'

Strenth of a Giant available to buy on amazon.com Paperback

http://www.amazon.com/Strength-Giant-Tony-Passarelli/dp/1446600297/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1300113504&sr=1-5

Strength of a Giant Kindle US

http://www.amazon.com/Strength-of-a-Giant-ebook/dp/B004O6MSTW/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=A7B2F8DUJ88VZ&s=digital-text&qid=1303654652&sr=1-1

Strenth of a Giant available to buy on amazon.co.uk Paperback

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Strength-Giant-Tony-Passarelli/dp/1446600297/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1299675053&sr=1-1

Strength of a Giant Kindle UK

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Strength-of-a-Giant-ebook/dp/B004O6MSTW/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&m=A3TVV12T0I6NSM&qid=1299675053&sr=1-1

Strength of a Giant available to buy in paperback and pdf download at lulu.com

http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/Tone

the birds have left the building

Everything seems to be slowing down a touch for Summer.

The baby birds on our porch have moved on, thank the heavens. I'm all for baby birds and live and let live and all that, but they turned out to be some rather messy tenants. They left a dead brother or sister behind, mushed into the framework of the nest, poor little thing.

The mourning dove disappeared, leaving behind two pretty pink eggies. They're gone now too. We have no more birdies in the yard, with the exception of the ones just passing through.

The kids will be off school soon, which means no more girl waking me up at 5:30am with her getting-ready sounds. She isn’t loud or anything. I just wake up mainly because someone is moving around in the house.

Let’s see where I am on the primary writing project. I planned to write a LOT this past weekend. I didn’t get as much done as I wanted to because of a little bit of dumbassery on my part.

I upgraded my Windows last week from XP to 7, which apparently is a traumatic experience for a computer. You can’t really just do an “upgrade” in that case. You have to do a new installation, which nukes all your files on the desktop and pretty much any and all software that is not Windows related.

I backed up everything…almost. I backed up some cover art images for the remix project (horror novel), which triggered this idea in my mushy brain that I had backed up the book itself. Alas.

At first, I thought I lost 66 pages of hard copy edit transfers. That is about 3 weeks’ worth of pain in my ass evening work. When I checked my backup file (an older one), I figured out that I actually only lost about 16 pages. Still, I spent most of my holiday weekend redoing changes. Not fun!

I did eventually get back to writing. Current word count is – 38558.

I like how everything is coming together. I’m confident that the finished product is going to be the best thing I’ve written yet.

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Hey, want some free reading? Check out the fiction freebie page on this very blog!
There you shall find links to two free ebooks on Smashwords and novel excerpts on Scribd.

Other places to find me:
http://www.LeaRyan.com/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/LeaRyan1