Thanks to Affaire de Coeur for making me the January/February author of the month, and for putting together such an awesome issue. (And you can subscribe online and download the issue!)

The article talks about the Blood Lily Chronicles (TAINTED, TORN & TURNED) and me in general. Check it out!

I’m lazing here on the couch watching the kids play Battleship with their dad, and I thought-”hey, great opp for a review–on the run blogging!”

I like this app. It’s handy and easy. You’re not going to be doing an HTML heavy entry from it, but would you really want to?

Upsides- ease of use-you just start typing, and photos embed where you tell them to. It lets you set up lots and lots of blogs, which is cool, and you can post simultaneously to multiple blogs. I’m doing that now with juliekenner.com and jkbeck.com

Downsides: I’ve lost work I thought I’d saved. Lesson learned-compose in another program and paste. Also, it tends to give me an error if I try to include more than 1 photo. (Catherine, my kiddo, tells me she doesn’t have that problem, so it may be a total size issue rather than the number of pics). I have 3 photos in this entry. We’ll see if it posts thru.

Also, the image inserted has to be in your library or camera roll- you can’t snap and go (though I typed, closed, snapped, and opened right up to my draft)

Also on the downside, there doesn’t appear to be anyway to include tags or categories or hyperlinks. If that capability exists, it’s not intuitive.

The app is 2.99, and since I can’t include a link, just search for Blogpress in the app store. There’s a lite version, but I can’t speak to it. All in all, I’m giving 4 out of 5 iPhones to this app, which may be a little generous considering the lack of certain features and the occasional lost data, but on the whole I like the app, it’s simicitu and it’s ease of use.

Later, I’ll review the WordPress app.

{{Please post comments over at J.K. Beck! App reviews are a regular feature over there!!}}

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

My name is J.K., and I’m an iPhone App-oholic.

Seriously. It’s rather scary, though less expensive than being a Desktop App-oholic. (So many apps are free, free, free!)

But rather than let some of my fun, productive, useful and, yes, crappy-ass Apps simply sit on my phone doing their little app things, I thought I should review them. And so the All About Apps category is going to be a regular feature of the blog (you gotta love regular features–it takes away that “what the HECK should I write about” problem).

via J.K. Beck.

Seeing as I am J.K. Beck, I’m an app-aholic, too.  Come join me over at my J.K. Beck site, where I’ll be reviewing all my little iPhone goodies!

LEGO building blocks are, truly, some of the coolest toys out there. Now, I don’t qualify as a major geek I can’t write machine code, and I don’t own a Wii, but I definitely appreciate the several stories tall Lego creations that you can find in cool places like the Times Square Toys R Us and the LEGO store at Disneyland.

via J.K. Beck.

I recently signed up for Google Alerts, and let me tell you…talk about an education.  I knew my books were appearing on Torrent sites (because I send a never ending stream of “you’re violating my copyright, please take this down” emails), but I had no idea how MANY torrent sites until I signed up (which is weird because, like 99.9% of authors out there, late at night when the manuscript is going slowly, I’ll Google my name, just to see what’s out there, and I would only rarely find these sites.  GA finds tons.  Several per day.  Damn depressing.)

So I thought this post was particularly appropriate, and very informative.  My husband works in a school, and from what I hear about what the kids talk about, most of them just don’t get it.  It’s out there, online, how can it be bad?  But it is, because, hey, it’s stealing.  Folks need to be educated, folks.  Pass it on.

“Piracy.” It sounds so romantic, doesn’t it? The high seas. Adventure . . .

But there’s nothing romantic about the case in Minnesota where a woman was fined $2 million for illegally downloading 24 songs and sharing them with others. Last Friday, the judge slashed her fine dramatically – by more than $1.8 million — saying the initial punishment was too much.

via Blog – Murderati.

Hey! My alter ego website is live! There’s information about my upcoming Shadow Keeper series–including awesome advance quotes and the back cover copy of the first two books, a link to join the mailing list, a link to enter a contest to win a Kindle and an ARC, and lots more. Plus a blog with fun features like The (mostly) Daily Factoid, The Cocktail Hour, and other fun stuff.

I hope you check it out!

So this is what’s keeping me up tonight (not really–that would be revisions). I recently saw the new Star Trek film for the second time (and, yes, I think it is absolutely awesome). But here’s the thing……

!!! Do not read below the image unless you’re willing to read spoilers!!!!!!!

Spock and Nero come backwards in time through a black hole. Clearly they survive or else, hey, we wouldn’t have a movie.

But then the entire climax of the movie is that the Enterprise is about to get sucked into a black hole–and the hull is cracking, things are bad, and clearly if they don’t get free (Scotty–”I’m giving you all she’s got!”), then that’s the end of our new heroes. No suggestion that, oh, they’d just travel back to 2010, or forward to stardate whatever-and-such

Um…anyone else see a problem there?

Not that said problem mucked up my enjoyment of the movie, but I’d really like to know!

I’ve mentioned my Evernote lust in my blog before…and this awesome article shows why Evernote really is uber-cool!

As I’ve been alluding to pretty heavily over the last couple of days, I’m taking my Evernote-fu up a notch. After pretty careful deliberation, I’ve decided to take a pretty major leap and put all of my tasks, action lists, etc. into Evernote. This post will detail how I exactly I make this work (and it’s pretty damn simple). If you want to follow along, you’ll need to have an Evernote account and it would be helpful to have a Twitter account, though it’s not required. Let’s do this.

via Dead Simple Task Management with Evernote — Brett Kelly Dot Org.

So, I’m finally getting around to breathing life into my alter ego (who is, of course, ten pounds thinner and with much better hair). I’ve set up a Twitter account and a Facebook account, and I’m going to take the website live this coming Monday! Whoo hoo!

So, track me — aka J.K. Beck — down on Twitter and Facebook … and stay tuned for the announcement for the new website going live!

Great article on entertaining (or not entertaining!) your kids, and a perspective I’m behind one hundred billion percent.

I have found that as long as our children expect us to entertain them –if we put them off with the prospect of “maybe,” — they will never quit pestering. “Are we going?” “When are we going?” “Can we go now?” “When will you know?”

But if, on the other hand, we are very clear that the desired activity is not going to happen, that we really are too busy, they will go off and entertain themselves beautifully.

via The Boredom Problem.