The Adventures of LitBoy: Bill Brent's Blog

WHY MY LITBOY.COM BLOG IS NOW A MARKETPLACE TOO

INTRODUCTION

I have a lot of fun and unusual vintage items, mostly authentic retro bowling collectibles from the Fifties through the Eighties, that I need to sell in order to make more space in my home.

I planned to re-open MY EBAY STORE this month, but then I remembered how eBay had bullied me with legal threats back in 2004, when I wanted to become a Trading Assistant. A "TA" is an experienced eBay seller, acting as broker and working on commission for folks who don't want to set up and run eBay auctions themselves. This gives many more sellers access to the eBay market and generates more revenue for eBay. So I chose the supportive URL, HoorayForEbay (dot com), but then eBay swiftly sent me a cease-and-desist order alleging trademark infringement and warning me not to use the URL. So I decided not to become a TA. Lose-lose.

While I have remained on eBay for the past three years, I felt blocked when I tried to re-start my store this month. So I went online this week, searching for "eBay alternatives," which led to blogs decrying eBay's controlling and manipulative tendencies. It was déjà vu all over again. Their bad behavior hasn't improved since 2004: with several rounds of big eBay fee hikes, "fixes" to things that weren't broken, and failure to fix things that were, eBay appeared worse than ever.

Then it came to me in a flash: eBay is the ultimate alcoholic parent.

— Forever greedy, self-absorbed, and unhappy with itself;
— Bent on punishing others for its own defects of character.

So I realized that, in good conscience, I cannot support eBay as a seller, at least not for now.

Here are a few examples:

WHY I'VE LOST THAT EBAY-LOVIN' FEELIN'

Craigslist would have been a logical alternative, but I live on the Big Island of Hawaii, and the Craigslist market here is teeny-weeny. So here we are. Welcome to my online store!

SO WHY HERE?

Logically, I'd put my odd and interesting vintage items up for sale on their very own website — yet even more logically, why not put them right here, where there is already an audience?

— I don't have enough stuff to justify the expense and maintenance of a merchant website (which would be best suited for mass merchandise anyhow).

— I'm not interested in starting up with one of the eBay competitors such as Yahoo! auctions, since now I'm looking for the exit door.

— I also thought about paying an extra monthly fee to start a second blog for my items, but this blog already keeps me busy. Plus, it has yet to earn steady enough Tip Jar contributions to be self-sustaining. So why not help subsidize this blog with a few sales?

And here we are.

HOW TO BUY MY STUFF

I have created a new subject tag here: FOR SALE. Just click on the "FOR SALE" tag in the sidebar to see what's currently up for grabs. Most of my items are priced between $30 and $100 — postage, insurance, and tracking included, so there are no hidden costs. You can be assured of my honesty, integrity, and extensive experience with online sales by visiting my eBay and Amazon Marketplace feedback pages. Here are those links:

[ eBay ]

[ Amazon ]

Then, if you see something with the "for sale" tag that you would like to own, please go to The LitBoy Store in the sidebar of this LitBoy.com blog to order, or for further details.

Then, if you still have questions, please post a comment to that item's blog entry. That will send me a private email, which I will reply to ASAP with easy instructions on how to complete your purchase.

(Since I moderate all comments to this blog, your comment will not ever post for public view. Transactions are private and completed via PayPal. (Yes, I know that PayPal is an eBay-owned company, but that's the best I can do for right now.) Or, by special arrangement, I can accept a US Postal Service money order if that works better for you.

Any questions? Have I left something out? Just holler, please.

Wishing you a beautiful day,

Bill Brent

[this page last updated: 2007.12.19, 12:15 p.m. Hawaii time]

LitBoy.com is a professional blog. Keeping it online costs me $200 per year. That's before paying me for my writing, photography, or anything else I do here. If you enjoy this blog, please use the Tip Jar at the top of this page. Your two-dollar minimum donation helps keep this banner-free site alive. It's quick and easy!

80.99 / $199.90 (40.5%)

This meter displays this year's contributions to date in U.S. dollars (after the funds processor takes its cut). Make a donation, watch the meter rise! Usually I post your contribution on my next blog post.

All original materials here on LitBoy.com (writing, photos, drawings, graphics, etc.) belong to Bill Brent. If you want to re-use something here, please ask. Higher resolution images are available.

Examples of Folly

Quite often, what was one generation's version of folly turns out to be counted among its most coveted artifacts, and the most prized acquisitions of future generations. "Junk" so often becomes a hand-me-down, or something that is highly decorative or even useful once the mainstream culture catches up to the milieu from which it sprang forth. I'm thinking of cheesy garage band or surf music instruments -- like the Teisco electric guitar or the Farfisa Compact combo organ.

Here's a contemporary example (up to the minute, even):

Crocheted penises on exhibit

(NOTE: "folly" and "phallus" are descended from the same root word.)

Any other examples? Thoughts on this one?

—Bill

[NOTE: This is copied from a thread I started at http://litboy.ning.com/forum/topic/show?id=692511%3ATopic%3A12 . If you want to join an ongoing group devoted to discussing purposeful folly, you can go to http://litboy.ning.com and sign up.]

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Wishing you a beautiful day,

Bill Brent

LitBoy.com is a professional blog. Keeping it online costs me $179 per year. That's before paying me for my writing, photography, or anything else I do. If you enjoy this blog, please use the Tip Jar at the top of this page. Your two-dollar minimum donation helps keep this banner-free site alive. It's quick and easy!

31 / 179 (17.2%)

This meter displays this year's contributions to date in U.S. dollars (after the funds processor takes its cut). Make a donation, watch the meter rise! Usually I post your contribution within 24 hours.

All original materials here on LitBoy.com (writing, photos, drawings, graphics, etc.) belong to Bill Brent. If you want to re-use something here, please ask. Higher resolution images are available.

Ya gotta wonder... (Googling on sex, drugs, and writing)

Sex, drugs, and ... writing? "Blogging out" is like rocking out. Blogs often convey the raw, hedonistic, do-it-yourself ethic of primal forms of popular music. After all, "popular" means "of the people," and nowadays millions of people are blogging.

As with rock'n'roll, anyone can blog. As with good rock, good blogging takes attitude. So if you can express your attitude with twenty-six letters and an Internet connection (as opposed to, say, three chords and an amp), then you can blog well. Also, consider this:

"I do what I do because I was always a big fan. The ultimate fan transcends fandom and does it himself."
    — Clem Burke, drummer for Blondie, quoted in Blondie, by Lester Bangs, p. 34 (Simon & Schuster, 1980).

The same principle applies to success in any creative discipline: Those who persist the longest and hardest in a chosen discipline (i.e., the most passionately) tend to become its most powerful practitioners.

One of the kewl features of this typepad.com professional blog account is that it shows me where a fair number of my blog's search-engine hits originate, as well as the search phrase.

So, with that in mind, here are a few of the web-surfs that washed Googlers and other web-searchers onto my site over the past ten days, in keeping with our sex, drugs, and writing theme:

 

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From blogger.com blog search: "jerk off party" (hit #31)
- 2007.03.14, 8:30 PM, referencing: THE JOSE STORY (Feb. 23)

From http://www.searchalot.com: "mother-superior sucked my dick" (hit #15)
- 2007.03.14, 9:07 PM, referencing: /sex/index.html

From Google.co.uk:

"polish chocolates and cocaine" (hit #11)
- 2007.03.07, 9:11 AM, referencing: /food_and_drink/index.html

"sticky vicky sexy magic show" (hit #20) litboy.typepad.com/my_weblog/sex/index.html
- 2007.03.11, 1:33 PM, referencing: /sex/index.html

From Google.com:

"coffee pot meth" (hit #4)
- 2007.03.16, 5:03 AM, referencing: TEMPEST IN A COFFEE POT (Jan. 15)

—Look at some of the other hits if you want to read about the controversy over coffee pots and burners in hotel rooms, mostly inspired by a single Alabama article that was widely spread across the Internet. The reader comments on some of these hits are interesting. My take: with meth, the larger the news outlet, the more sensationalized the stories tend to be.

"Stay off ecstasy, self help" (hit #21)
- 2007.03.16, 7:33 AM, referencing: /rant/index.html

"brush your teeth with my cock" (hit #2)
- 2007.03.07, 4:20 PM, referencing: litboy.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/01/brush_your_care.html
…oh, and [ here's hit #1. ]

"cum spaghetti dinner" (hit #6)
- 2007.03.10, 5:23 PM, referencing: litboy.typepad.com/my_weblog/sex/index.html

"garage jerking off" (hit # 2)
- 2007.03.10, 7:22 PM

—Note that this search landed at KID PRO QUO (Feb. 16), my sex-story post from late January, which was not at all about the garage – so c'mon, peeps, get busy writing them garage whack-off tales! There's a niche to be, uh, filled…. I can see the anthology now: "Grease Marks the Spot"….

"Mom walked in just as my stiff cock popped out" (hits #8 and #16), referencing: litboy.typepad.com/my_weblog/sex/index.html
- 2007.03.10, 2:01 PM

"couldnt pop a boner" (hit #6)
(to which, LOL, Google prompts the question:
"Did you mean: could pop a boner" ?
- 2007.03.12, 11:16 PM, referencing: KID PRO QUO (Feb. 16)

"fluff couples and cum cleaners" (hit # unknown. It must have been buried past the first 200 hits; that's where I gave up.)
- 2007.03.13, 4:30 AM, referencing: /sex/index.html

"prayer to brush your teeth" (hit #11, OMG! I'm sure my electric toothbrush-as-sex-vibrator story ain't what this Googler had in mind.)
- 2007.03.15, 4:19 AM, referencing: BRUSH YOUR CARES AWAY (Jan. 27)

[ This one ] (hit #18) turned into an amusing thread – Is there a lot more funny porn like mine out there? Obviously there's a market for the stuff.

"stories that use graphic" (hit #1 of 1!)
- 2007.03.15, 6:29 AM, referencing: just the disclaimer text I created for [ my three sex stories posted to date. ]

And, finally, someone from Ireland (Google.ie) finds the secrets to high-volume writing output, Googling on: [ write 3000 words a day ] (hit #3)
- 2007.03.15, 4:34 AM

 

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We will never agree unilaterally on any secrets regarding the writing process, other than to just do it. That would be like trying to get everyone to agree on the "proper" way to paint; you have to discover your own rhythms and techniques.
[ Here's an example. ]
 

[ This one, too ] — it's great stuff, albeit daunting.

…like what I did on [ my 3000 word day of writing, ] only every day for an entire year! Imagine [ NaNoWriMo ] as your daily job. Hmmm, I wonder….

And, oh, looky, all this obsessive journaling I've been doing for nearly thirty years does have its benefits:

"Once you get into a daily writing habit (one page, come on, you can write ONE page, can't you?) you begin to see the world as a writer sees it, the ordinary inside the great, the tiny brilliances in the everyday. You begin to see with a writer's eyes. But only, ONLY if you commit to the idea of writing every day."

Now, compare this statement to mine, dated: 3/4/2006, 5:34 PM:

"Find the heroic in the mundane, and the mundane in the heroic, and you are well on your way to transcending the bullshit of life."

(Yeah, I'm so writing-obsessed that I even time-stamp my quotable quotes.)

So maybe I'm doing something right, after all.

 

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Oh, and [ one more, heh. ]
(hit #9 on the phrase "sex machines" – wow, thanks, typepad, for the good indexing placement.)
- 2007.03.15, 11:21 AM, referencing: BRUSH YOUR CARES AWAY (Jan. 27).

Since these hits were all logged at my blog, the tracking required no effort on my part, making this even better than [ ego-surfing. ]

And here's a fun toy for that, you egotist, you:

Ego-surfing without the guilt (as if!)

 

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Wishing you a wonderful (and guilt-free) day,

—Bill Brent

If you enjoy this blog, please use the Tip Jar at the top of this page. Your two-dollar minimum donation helps keep this banner-free site alive. It's quick and easy!

All original photos on this website (LitBoy.com) belong to Bill Brent. If you want to re-use something here, please ask. Higher resolution images are available.

2007.02.27, Picture of the Day, Big Island of Hawaii

VISUAL POETRY

I have been taking hundreds of digital pictures from various parts of the Big Island of Hawaii all month long. These are too good to keep all to myself, so for the entire month of March, this blog features a different scenic image each day. To kick things off, here is a preview of coming attractions. Please bookmark and enjoy!

Welcome to Hawaii Island, where the ground really can open up and swallow you. I took this shot at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, near the active volcano Kilauea. Heads up for those orange cones!

...and I didn't have to drive very far to find this one. It's from my backyard, and yes, I am very lucky to live here.

In other news ... I spent an hour or two today brainstorming promotional strategies, after an email exchange in which a writer colleague and I were scratching our heads as to how we might better leverage this blog phenomenon for mutual fun and profit. I like her blog -- it is both heartfelt and thought-provoking -- and so, since actions speak louder than, you know, go check it out!

Dirty Laundry

...or, if you just want to sink your teeth into something especially chewy, try this:

Erma Bombeck in the Blogosphere

As always, if you find something here that you especially like, please leave a tip in the Tip Jar at the top of this page. Minimum donation, just two dollars!

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Wishing you a beautiful day,

—Bill Brent

I feel so normal. Thank the heavens!

Typically I don't follow the news, even less so the gossipy headlines related to who's doing what outrageous thing to whom (or to themselves) at the moment. The human comedy always draws upon the same set of stock characters, and it's only the names that change. However, this week seems to take the cake.

Mostly I'm tuned in at the moment because I've been following the headlines via my LiveJournal friends' postings and clicking on the links. Like the movie title says, it's a mad, mad, mad, mad world. I am not above a bit of schadenfreude based on the famed ones' falls from grace, though  I am merely a bit amused. I admit that I'm waiting for my subconscious to emit the mental elephant-fart that will form the perfect punchline to this week's bizarre celebri-combo of Ted Haggard, Anna Nicole Smith, that diaper-wearing astronaut chick (after a quick net-search that only gave me the first part of her name, I'm christening her Vicki Sue Poo Poo), and ... Prince's dubiously intentional halftime phallic shadow-play? Whatevvuh. It's all about sex, and sex sells. Fortunately for me, I am blessed with the equivalent of a shredded bit of cheesecloth for a pop-culture memory, so probably I will have forgotten most of the week's notorious names and their associated vices well before the end of this shortest of months.

I can't really write about any of it because everyone else seems to be doing such a bang-up job already. I haven't even felt compelled to post anything to either of my blogs over the past several days because my life has been delightfully prosaic, and I've been too happily absorbed with my current work to dredge up something blog-worthy from the past.

Besides, did you notice how AMERICAN all this fluff is? It makes me wonder how the rest of the world can take us seriously. Oh, that's right, they probably don't. Shrug.

I did achieve one minor milestone today: I passed the 50,000 word mark with my novel. Other than this week's rather scattershot online surfing, ongoing personal maintenance chores such as food-shopping, house-cleaning, and yardwork, and some odd bits of income-producing effort, I have nothing going on here. Zip, zero, zilch, nada. Instead, my posterior is planted, pasted, and otherwise positioned in this swivelling armchair to achieve maximum cranial output for as many hours per day as I can bear. Lately I'm even culling useful novel material from my dreams at night.

So my life is simple, and I'm just going to keep coming back to this comfy chair until it's finished. Given the rapid rate of progress, in combination with my temperamental tandem of stubbornness and boredom-intolerance, I expect I'll have my first draft completed within a couple of months. I have no post-novel plans. I have some vague notions about what I'd like to accomplish once this project is in the can, but right now, I live to work. I'm a slave to this project. It's the same way I completed my Cleis book back in 2001, and the one before that in 1996, so I know this is what it takes. I just stop having any other kind of life, except perhaps for a superficial, vicarious one based on the foibles of the mentally unstable who seem to form the feast of fools we now regard as fame-worthy.

I may be no better, but at least I'm not distracted. Much.

I want One.

Am I the last person on the Internet to see this?

A One that is not cold is scarcely a One at all.

It seriously cracked me up. I'm still not sure why. It was probably just the mental cleansing I needed after an evening spent researching logical fallacies ... all because of an episode in my novel involving wheatgrass.

Which is an entirely new world to me (the formal argument world, not the wheatgrass world). HOW did I survive to the ripe old age of 46 without ever learning the language of logic to debunk an opponent's argument? Now I actually have words to put to some of the specious drivel that the credulous woo-woo-heads have been bombarding me with for decades. It's like learning how to drive a car -- more fun and way easier than I had allowed myself to believe.

Stop self-defeating behavior and learn how to talk back to idiots with no evidence ... free, on Ye Olde Internet!

These sites were particularly useful:

The appeal to be open-minded
Five apples
Woo

Here's a fun, offbeat blog, courtesy of my Bay Area pal Greta, combining skepticism, sex, cat blogging, and more:
Greta Christina's Blog

And, last but not least, for the encyclopedically inclined:
List of Fallacy Pages: A (etc., etc., etc.)

--Bill

OK, now that we've got garlic breath, introductions are in order.

SO, WHY LITBOY?

Well, I wanted to use my actual name for this blogsite, but that username was already taken at typepad.com, so I got creative. LitBoy.com is one of a dozen or so domain names I currently own, so LitBoy it is.

The "lit" in "litboy" is short for "literature," so it's an apt handle for a writer. "Lit" can also be construed as "illuminated" or "on fire." It's also French for "bed," and since I have a history as a sex writer, ç'est à propos. Plus, LitBoy is short and catchy, which is good for a URL or nickname. It's also easy to pronounce, spell, and hear. English is difficult enough, so I like things simple and clear.

This is primarily my professional writing blog, but anything can happen here. Life is seldom neat and tidy. How many boxes do you find in nature, anyhow? My first entry here was a recipe.

So the Adventures of LitBoy, a/k/a Bill Brent's Blog, a/k/a LitBoy's Lounge, is a place to say hi, speak your mind about the blog and life in general, and otherwise make yourself comfortable. Feel free to introduce yourself right here by replying with a Comment to this post. You don't need to give your email or a URL to comment -- I've set up the Lounge so you can be discreet about yourself.

Actually, I still barely know how to make this thing run, but as I like to say, confusion precedes competence. I'll be great at this in no time. It's fun.

ONE MORE THING --

When you read something here that you especially like, I encourage you to use the Tip Jar at the top of this page  -- it's easy, fast, and you can donate as little as two dollars. I make my living by writing. With the ongoing depletion of "dead-tree" outlets that pay writers a living wage, I am looking ahead and seeing the Internet as the primary means of earning an income. My colleague and pal Susie Bright has encouraged me to kick off this blog, for we both understand  that the sooner we face current publishing realities, the better our chances of surviving gracefully one of the harshest industry shakeouts in the history of the printed word.

So, as they used to say about voting in Chicago, I encourage you to post here early and often. This is a place to enjoy ourselves....

--Bill Brent