Let’s Get Digital!
This is the web page to receive a free copy of a book, called “Let’s Get Digital” by David Gaughran. http://davidgaughran.wordpress.com/lets-get-digital/ And I’m posting about it today, not only because David is a friend and has written a book about indie publishing, but because I’m in it as one of 33 authors who have found success via the indie route. How exciting! The pitch: You won’t make any money from self-publishing. MYTH! The internet has revolutionized every business it has come into contact with, and publishing is no different. For the first time, these changes are handing power back to the writer. It’s up to YOU if you want to profit from them. Let’s Get Digital: How To Self-Publish, And Why You Should. This guide contains over 60,000 words of essays, articles, and how-to guides, as well as contributions from 33 bestselling Read more…
Happy Birthday to Me :)
I thought about mentioning that 43 is the median life expectancy of the women I’ve surveyed in the Middle Ages, but that is WAY to morbid for today! I don’t seem to have my baby picture scanned in, but you’ll have to make do with 14: This is my husband and me looking dorky in 1983. At Koobi Fora Field School, Kenya (in the back, just to the left of the middle post) At Stonehenge with friends in 1988 (third from left) My eldest and me in 1991. In Belize in 1994. 2000 Akka, Israel, 2008 20 seconds ago
Nationalism and Wind farms
I found this while doing research on Pelagius, believe it or not. It comes from this page: http://welshpatriot.blogspot.com/2011/07/congratulations-to-pobl-powys-on-your.html I can’t decide how I feel about this, in part because we are having the very same discussion in Oregon, though it is less the Umatilla Tribe that opposes windfarms than people who live in the Columbia River gorge who don’t want their view spoiled. I have never heard the building of wind farms framed in terms of nationalism, but it’s all over the web for Wales: This one attests that the white eagle’s habitat is being destroyed. Wind farms were blamed for eagle deaths in Norway: http://www.socme.org/may06downloads/birds0506.jpg Though my son points out that more birds are killed (by a magnitude of a hundred fold) by glass windows every year than wind farms. “Building window strikes may account for 97 to 976 Read more…
The Pelagian Heresy
The Pelagian heresy is an important part of any discussion of religion in Wales during the era formerly known as the Dark Ages. Pelagius was a British monk, born around 350 AD, who moved to Rome and was a contemporary of St. Augustine. His crucial fault was that he believed that the notion of original sin–that all men were condemned because of the actions of Adam–was false. Unfortunately, our primary source of his writings are not the writings themselves, but the reaction to them on the part of his opponents. He was condemned as a heretic by Augustine, whose teachings became predominant in the church. http://www.brojed.org/IE/pelagius.php; for a list of primary sources: http://www.earlychurch.org.uk/pelagius.php The two differing paths are: Augustine: 1. Death comes from sin, not man’s physical nature; 2. Infants must be baptized to be cleansed from original sin and those who die without Read more…
Cold My Heart: Sample Tuesday!
In a fit of I’m-not-sure-what, I lowered the price of Cold My Heart to 99 cents across all platforms (though it will take a while for Smashwords to distribute it to Apple, Barnes and Noble, etc.). Meanwhile, you an buy it at Amazon: http://tinyurl.com/67v6cfl Amazon UK: http://tinyurl.com/5vxrm67 and Smashwords: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/52673 And here’s the first chapter and a bit . . . (Translated from the Latin) To Archbishop Dafydd: We must speak of the evils wrought upon us by my nephew Modred and his Saxon allies, how the peace formerly made has been violated in all the clauses of the treaty, how churches have been fired and devastated, and ecclesiastical persons, priests, monks and nuns slaughtered, women slain with children at their breast, hospitals and other houses of religion burned, the Welsh murdered in their homes, in churches, yes at the Read more…
Medieval Life Expectancy: Muslim World verses Christian World
What was the life expectancy of those in the medieval Muslim world compared to Christian Europe? It is taken as given in this day and age that people living in Europe in the Middle Ages didn’t bathe much, if at all, had no real knowledge of science or medicine, and their high mortality rates were a consequence of this general ignorance. Neither of the these assertions are, in fact, true, but the average human life span in the Middle Ages was significantly lower than the modern one nonetheless. I have discussed this in several places on this blog. Here: https://sarahwoodbury.com/life-expectancy-in-the-middle-ages/ I discuss the life span of the royal house of Wales and the Marche. Eliminating individuals who died before adulthood completely from the equation, the mean life expectancy for women was 43.6 years, with a median of 42/43; for men, it was a mean Read more…
Great Writing Quotes
I am off the grid for 6 whole days! No cell phone, no internet, nada. This to keep you entertained while I’m gone . . . “Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” –E.L. Doctorow “The first duty of the novelist is to entertain. It is a moral duty. People who read your books are sick, sad, traveling, in the hospital waiting room while someone is dying. Books are written by the alone for the alone.” — Donna Tartt “You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.” — Jack London “I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I Read more…
Over at Love Thy Author Today!
Here’s the link to what they’ve got going about my book. . . Go check it out 🙂 http://www.lovethyauthor.com/ Happy Fourth of July!
Books on Sale at Smashwords!
In honor of summer, and my trip tomorrow going off the grid for six whole days, all my books are 50% off at Smashwords, through July 31! Here’s the link! http://www.smashwords.com/books/search?query=woodbury%2C+Sarah Enjoy 🙂
^