Over the last month, I’ve been doing some late late night web work for free for some old college friends. Emphasis on old, ha ha! Hi Nads! Hi Erin! 
These friends have been wonderful to me through the years, taking care of me and mine when things went bad, and just being there for me the rest of the time. The least I can do is share server space and bandwidth, and help them out with my mad skillz.
My friend Erin is publishing her own novel, which she has been working on for years. I made a promotional website for her book, and I’ve just finished setting her up with a web store. We’re finally live!
Jane E, Friendless Orphan : a Memoir is a sci-fi novel based on Charlotte Brönte’s Jane Eyre. She basically did a rewrite of a 1800s blockbuster hit chick flick (if there had been blockbuster hit chick flicks in the 1800s, that’s what Jane Eyre would have been.) And in my opinion, my friend Erin turned it into a William Gibson / Bruce Sterling epic, with touches of Jane Austen and Charlotte Brönte romanticism. I did her site late at night in between work, family and sleep, so it isn’t as kick ass as I’d have liked. But I’ll revamp it over the next few weeks.
I’d like to ask for a favor from my readers. Go check out her site, read the novel excerpts, and blog about it.
If you’re interested in buying my friend’s novel AND you’ve blogged about it, I can get you a 5% off discount coupon code to use on her web store. Tell your readers, get them to blog, and not only do they get a 5% discount code too, you get a 10% off discount. (These discounts are sponsored by me. You’ll get your money off, and I will cover my friend’s full price. Everybody wins.)
Help my friend pick up some Google juice, and get some money off on some summer reading (it also would make a great gift for those graduating seniors.) No bloggy, no tickie.
Comment here once you’ve blogged about it. I will also check Technorati trackbacks on this post, to see how the experiment is going, and work out which coupon you’ve earned. It can hardly be called work to write a few paragraphs (specially when you can quote from here and her website), and you get to save some money on some great reading material.
And thanks!
My other friend’s website isn’t so serious, and it literally took me 30 minutes to set up, and it’s not so potentially kick ass because I didn’t write any of the web code. But it’s no less special. Nada Boldly Going Nowhere, is a photo gallery, plain and simple. Maybe someday she’ll get further with the times, and ask me to set her up with a blog. It will be a cooking blog, probably. Or a knitting blog. Or a gardening blog. If we go by 70% of the pictures in her gallery, it will be a kitty porn blog. (Update: she’s put up more pictures, and the ratio of cats to other things has shifted. So it’s now a more heterogeneous mix. Oh well.)
I can’t coerce you to blog about this one, as there are no products for sale involved. But visit the site if you’d like. Blog about it if you want.
At any rate, help me and my friends pick up some Google juice, and I’ll make it worth your while.
Yo Pj,
Good to spot your up periscope. Might have something even better. Have her contact evo at dragonpage dot com for possible review/maybe interview on their cover to cover show. Also is she interested in doing audio version for podiobooks.com? Both good opportunities for exposure. Still down in Puerto Rico? Ciao mano.
Hola Mark, nice hearing from you too!
I’ll pass your recommendation on to my friend. She’s always looking for more exposure.
I’m still down in PR, for the next two months at least. My ongoing Rails contract work keeps bringing more work behind it.
I am NOT staying, that much is already decided. I’m just delaying my departure while the local work I found is still good.
The practice with Rails, potential exposure, potential business, and professional reference, are too good to pass up.
Man your in God’s country-I still haven’t made it down there yet. Got to go where the work/dinero is. I hear ya. All the best-please feel free to have your friend contact me as well if she’d like.
I’ll pass your email address to Erin. Don’t forget to mention in your interview or book review or whatever, that your readership/listenership gets 5% off. They have to blog about it for their coupon code.
And you get 10 %. If you get a free book to review, I guess any discount is moot. I’ll figure something out then.
“God’s country”
Please fill me in.
What I see is a place smaller than Rhode Island, filled with inept fools, run by inept fools, no much better than a third rate third world country, but with somewhat of a working economy.
And that’s coming from someone born and raised here. This is said with a sad heart and much shame. But the truth is still the truth, even if it hurts. (I guess living in the USA mainland for 13 years has made me too hard to please now. But even in my teens, I remember wanting to get outta this back asswards backwater. The five years I’ve spent here have been a bit of a purgatory for me.)
And I’m not leaving because there’s no work here. There just none of the work I’d want to do. 98% of the IT infrastructure is Windows-based, everyone in IT has blinders on so tight they can’t see but a tunnel of bright light ahead of their nose, and I can’t stand the smell or taste of shit.
Totally off-topic: Where are you nowadays, BB? I seem to gather you’re in Thailand or some such place.
Peejdiddy, you are crazy with the coupon philanthropy! Oh, what shall I do with you, now that the jam thing has fallen through this week and we need to go berry picking again and the jam, as well as other things, must wait a bit more?
Mark, I am *very* interested in talking with you about the possibilities mentioned. As promised, Peej did pass along your contact information. I have a heavy workload today, but hopefully I’ll float a bottle your way some time in the next 24 hours.
And re: the Sterling/Gibson comment… I actually answered a question from a reader here, about how similar/different are WG’s Mona, NTS’s Diamond Age and my humble little Jane_E. If you have a second and like the other two writers, you might enjoy musings on same. Thanks!
Erin,
Which part of “I’d like to help you, free of charge, no strings attached” are you having problems processing?
Berry jam and banana bread are fine reimbursement indeed, I wouldn’t be happy with anything else. And I hear it’s best to wait for the fine things in life. 😉
Ahh, yeah it’s that old perspective thing again. In fact I’m in Taiwan but people always want to shift to ‘Thailand.” The first time I was in Thailand chilling on the beach, numerous vendors would stop trying topeddle their wares. I’d always invite them to rest and get a little shade on them. They’d all be, “oh you’re from america, ahhh.” Now this was a whole lot nicer than a lot of places in America and cetainly Brooklyn, but it’s the perspective thing again. They were poor and the beauty was not perceived in the same way if at all.
Thanks for bringing your perspective. I appreciate it.
I’ve always been struck by the physical beauty of this land, that’s for sure. Having grown up here, it resonates with me the way a Long Island beach stroll probably resonates with you.
I actually enjoy my twice weekly commute to the capital. As I concentrate on the road, with one corner of my eye I watch all the greenery on the flood plains and the overgrowth-ladden karst limestone hills jutting out of the north coastal plain.
The other month, I was chauffeuring my aunt to Ponce, a city in the south west part of the island (we live on the north central shore, five miles from the beach and thirty miles from the nearest city.) And the two hour drive down to Ponce has some of the most beautiful sights, with thousand foot drops to one side of the expressway, and mile-wide canyons between mountains. And green everywhere year-round.
Every once in a while, at least twice a year, preferably off-season, I take a break and go driving away from the cities, to some remote beach. I check into a resort for two nights, and spend Saturday and Sunday lazying it up under a shade tree by the waves, curled up with a good book.
So yeah, I like to think I have the beauty goggles on, even though I’m down on the place a lot.
What rubs me the wrong way here is the economic short-sightedness, the lack of long term and short term planning and no long view whatsoever. It’s all about getting and keeping as much money in as short a time as possible, to the detriment of everything else. Fools.
PJ-thanks for sharing. See I knew there was a lot of beauty in their. re: angst/disgust-don’t be so hard on them my friend. That is part of the human condition and exists everywhere. Much more noticeable on small islands (Puerto Rico, Taiwan). We need to deal with the latter so we have the resources to at least occasionally enjoy the former.In fact without the former, the latter is almost intolerable.
I grew up around a lot of Puerto Ricans, some of them would correct me and say the were Nuyorican. There’s a lot of fire/passion for life in that culture-to me that’s a good thing. My first exposure to platanos(plantains) as well. The music that came from and is inspired by Puerto Rico-wow!
Tito Puente, the palmieris,etc. http://www.musicofpuertorico.com/
To me this makes Puerto Rico a very magical kind of place-culturally-filtered.