Releasing my first music album

 

It took 20 years, but I finally released an album of music! This is a collection of songs, mostly written by my brother Rob Goble. In 2003-2004 I recorded my own interpretation of a number of his songs, along with one instrumental, on a Tascam 4-track. Recently I decided to take those tracks (which had since been digitized) and enlisted soundman Bill Durham to help me mix them and make them listenable. The result was this album, "A Place to Run."

You can buy the album on Bandcamp https://mikegoble.bandcamp.com/album/a-place-to-run

And you can stream it for free on Soundcloud https://soundcloud.com/michael-j-goble

Please spread the word about it so that maybe some people who don't even know me might find out and listen to it.

Fans of my audiobooks may notice that the album contains the instrumental "Copperpot" (previously known as Untitled Instrumental) which is used as the backing music in the beginning and ending credits section of the audiobook. My wife suggested that I give it that name for that reason.

It also includes the song "Grandpa was a Cowboy" which is based off of a poem by my uncle W. Kent Goble.

Thanks to Rob and uncle Kent for letting me release these, and special thanks to Bill Durham for being willing to help out mix these old tracks up to a better standard, making them sound way better than I ever could. Also thanks to magician Rick Morrill for his advice on improving the MIDI keyboard tracks on the electric version of the title track.

March 2024 Update on Book Three

Hi folks,

I thought I'd stop in and give you an update on Book Three of the Jerry Copperpot series.

The working title is "Jerry Copperpot and the Flight of Wagons." It mostly leaves behind the Harry Potter, Goonies, Star Trek/Star Wars and Narnia references of the previous books, and instead makes extensive parody reference to the Rankin-Bass animated films "The Last Unicorn" and "Flight of Dragons," along with Miyazaki's "Castle in the Sky" among many other things. In part, it's a road-trip novel, set five years after the events of the first two books, and Jerry is now a teenager with a driver's license. Jerry wants to leave the weirdness and metafiction of his past behind him, but it catches up to him in a big way, sending him on a final adventure with consequences for both his personal life and his whole world.

I almost wrote a whole advertising blurb for the plot, but I think I should save that for the final release of the book, once it's all written and copyrighted.

I estimate I'm about 75 percent done, now about 360 pages of manuscript so far. This sounds like a lot, but with it being the conclusion of the trilogy, I have a lot of material to cover. Also I have a lot of parodies and mashups to include- there are multiple targets to the parody and that makes it a little more ambitious and more complicated at the same time. I'm really excited to finish this story and eventually share it with people.

Work on the manuscript has accelerated in recent months, partly as an emotional escape from the stresses of life (of which I have many right now, to understate things) and partly just for the reward of a sense of accomplishment in working on my hobby.

I also had to leave behind certain other hobbies; namely watching too much TV. After two years of the book languishing near the back burner, I decided if I didn't cancel Netflix and other paid streaming services, I'd never get this book done. My kids were kind of mad that I canceled Disney, but I had other reasons to cut expenses at the time anyway, and we're getting by just fine without it.

Maybe now that I've told everyone what I'm working on, it will give me a little more accountability and motivation to move forward and get it past the finish line.

Plus once I get the rough draft done, I will be able to refocus my attention on the audiobook for Book Two, which has also been slow in coming in recent months.

Wish me luck!

A small but significant correction to Book Two

 

Hi folks, here I am again with yet another correction to book two. Those who know about my hearing loss will not find this surprising, but it turns out I've been mis-hearing, mis-pronouncing, and mis-spelling a particular word for decades, and I never noticed until now.

Some of you readers may have wondered about the "Glathe of Krippendorf," a weapon that gets used at the end of the book. My fellow Trekkies would have immediately noticed that it is shaped exactly like the trefoil emblem of the Klingon Empire. But that's only half of the mashup joke. It was supposed to be a variation on the multi-bladed weapon from the 1983 sci-fi/fantasy movie Krull.

Krull fans can already see where this is going.

This Thanksgiving, as I was preparing assorted casseroles the night before, I also engaged in a more recent tradition of watching Krull while cooking. This time, I watched the movie with subtitles and managed to pay a little more attention as I was waiting for the food to cool off after removing it from the oven. 

That's right: It was then that I finally noticed, after all these years, that the word is GLAIVE, not GLATHE!

Oops. [face palm]

The best I can tell is that, apart from the years separating the repeated childhood viewings of the film with the rediscovery of it in my college years, the name of the spinning fictional weapon also became confabulated somewhat with the word "lathe," which is a carpentry tool that spins a piece of wood. This unfortunately reinforced my false concept of the word's pronunciation, and it became yet another thing that I was totally clueless about for basically my whole life. It certainly doesn't help that the word glaive is an archaic term practially unknown to the general public outside of the cult nostalgia fandom for Krull. It's not nearly as iconic as, say, a lightsaber, for example.

Needless to say, I am now preparing a correction to the text, and taking the opportunity to add a couple of paragraphs to the scene to further cement the Krull reference in the description and use of the weapon.

Now I'm starting to get tired of saying this, but I guess it looks like all copies of the book printed before 2024 will be collector's editions due to the mistake in spelling and editing.

This is also going to affect the upcoming audiobook, as I'm basically going to have to re-record the entire scene with the corrected pronunciation of the word, as well as the rewritten lines. Not that I had actually gotten to that point in the audiobook edit anyway (I've been more focused on writing book three as it is)

So, there you have it. We can expect the corrected paperback and ebook to be available by New Years, probably, knock on wood.

Update on three concurrent projects

 I've got three concurrent projects I'm working on alternately at the moment.

Work continues on the audiobook for book two. I've posted chapter 13 to Soundclick. Incidentally, in search of new listeners, I've also posted the entire audiobook of book one to YouTube, but my antiquated software of choice, Windows Movie Maker, resulted in some pretty crappy audio quality, so I'll probably have to re-do it.

I'm about 124 pages into the manuscript for book 3, and I've made some real improvements to the plot summary for the rest; it really feels like it's coming together as a coherent story.

I've also recently begun serious work on a Spanish translation of book 1. Combining my own language skills with some surprisingly good help from Google Translate has made the project feasible, and so far I have completed two chapters of the first draft of the translation.

Updated Book Two's title in the sneak preview at the end of Book One

After my little anxiety attack about that line in chapter 5 of book two and making the one-word change associated with it, I figured while I was at it, I'd also update the ebook and paperback of book one where I have a sneak preview of book two at the end, to reflect the updated spelling of book two's title. So I guess that will result in more existing copies becoming collectors editions someday in the far future.

Made a one-word change in Book Two

(08-01-2022) Tonight I read an article about Beyoncé promising to re-record a lyric on her new album, and I found out that the word "spaz," which in the United States is a 1980's slang term for "freaking out" apparently in other countries is used as an ableist slur toward people with Cerebral Palsy.

I was horrified to find this out. I was not aware of this fact, as I had never heard the word ever used in this context. I had only ever heard it as a benign slang term as a kid.

Upon finding out about the derogatory use of this word, I am immediately removing it from the line in Chapter 5 of Book Two, in which Persephone referred to Don's reaction to finding the bootleg Oklabraska tape as a "happy fanboy spaz dance." I've removed it from both the ebook and the print version of Jerry Copperpot and the Voyage of the John Heeder. I am also cutting it out of the still-unfinished audiobook and will update the file on my Soundclick site.

If the Cancel Police are reading this, please be aware that whatever you say about me is probably not nearly as bad as the dialogue that I could write for Mulderscull in this situation.

But that said, I officially and fully apologize to any and every person I may have offended, either in the past or the future, with the use of that word.

Book Two has been retitled AGAIN!

 

I finally just went ahead and changed the spelling of Book Two's title AGAIN, this time to Jerry Copperpot and the Voyage of the John Heeder. Because I'm just that nitpicky, and my wife also confirms that John looks better than Jawn. It's less nonsensical, and helps to avoid distracting from the Narnia parody in the title. Here's to hoping that my fellow Narnia fans will like it better too.

Here's the link to the new ebook: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B2QK7VRD

And if Napoleon Dynamite's Jon Heder ever saw my book, I would hope he'd feel honored to have a fictional ship named after him in a non-infringing sort of way; a ship whose captain is a (spoiler alert!) giant trilobite that speaks only in phraseology derived from popular online quotes from the film.  Now, I'm just waiting for Amazon to approve the new edition. In the meantime, the previous versions have been discontinued. All existing copies of the previous two editions, including the 4 unsold ones sitting on a shelf in my bedroom, are now collector's items that are still worth reading but not worth collecting.

All previous blog posts referencing Book Two will be retroactively edited to reflect the new name and the links updated, as soon as I have the new links.

Now I have to change the title spelling on my advertising fliers, and turn the old ads into paper airplanes for my kids to throw around the house.

I also plan to fix the book purchase link, cover art, title etc on the available audiobook chapters on my Soundclick and Soundcloud pages. And maybe even get off my butt and do some more work on Book 3.

Because this is what you do when you're bored on Memorial Day.