A Shameless Plug

[John Straub]

Hi guys,

This is a shameless plug to check out and sign up for the blog I just started.

It's a "Car Guy" blog about members past and present, up-coming and past events as well as all kinds of Automobilia stuff.

Feel free to comment on anything you may see or send me stuff you want other people to read about.

http://www.johnstraub.blogspot.com

Check it out, sign up...you'll like it!

John

[galis]

Great idea John! I subscribed in my feed reader...
George

[martinreinhardt]

Nice site John.

I like the picture from your Green Rocket , you can see the Pagid brake pads underneath

[mobonic]

Also a great forum we started for porsche enthusiast:

RennTrack

http://www.renntrack.com


Its growing very fast, and we'd love more local people on it contributing tech info and talk!

[galis]

Great idea John! I subscribed in my feed reader...
George

For those wondering.... I use http://reader.google.com/ to subscribe to all manner of photos, blogs and misc posts, lets me organize, file in folders and view all unseen items from a single webpage. :-}

Nice to see you all at the Last Tuesday social.

George

[ttweed]

Rather than clutter up the forum by starting a new thread, I thought I would piggyback on John's shameless plug with one of my own.

As some of you know, one of the reasons I have been MIA from many driving events over the last few years (other than plain old lack of funds) is that I decided to discipline myself and finish a project I started in 1972, just to finally get it off my "bucket list." No, this wasn't another car project that has been sitting around for that long.

I started writing a novel a couple years after graduating from college and worked on it sporadically over the years while trying to earn a living in other pursuits (it ain't easy to make any money as a writer). I decided after retiring that it was time to sit down and finally finish it, so I did.

I wrote it under the pen name of Stewart Parks. Parks is actually my real middle name, and also my mother's maiden name. She gave it to me because she was one of three daughters, with no son to carry on the Parks name after they were all married off (in those days, women did not keep their maiden names as often as today). Stewart was the maiden name on my father's side of the family, and I just combined the two to create my pseudonym. (I always wanted a cooler nickname than "Tweety-bird", which I suffered from my whole life, and "Stewball" fits the bill for me.)

Anyway, after sweating bullets over it for two years, through many drafts and rewrites, it is finally out! It is available on Amazon.com in paperback and Kindle editions, but you can buy it "publisher-direct" for less on the Plowshare Media site. You can visit the preview page here and download the first two chapters for free by following the first link on that page, just to get a taste. Basically, it is a "coming of age" story about a kid growing up in the So. Cal. surfing world during the '60s, with a little "time travel" twist. It's not what I would call "light" reading, it's 336 pages in the serious literary fiction genre, and probably about R-rated (not for the kiddies).

It will take a couple of months for it to work it's way into the distribution chain so that it is available in bookstores (at least by ordering it, even if they don't stock it), and there will be a formal release party for it in the near future. I will definitely post here again to invite all my PCA friends when arrangements are finalized. Those of you to whom I gave advance review copies over the last few months, if you have an Amazon account, please post reviews of it there (unless of course you didn't like it ) Every little bit helps.

Thx,
TT

[mrondeau]

Tom,

Congratulations!!!! I hope your book does very well and I look forward to reading it. You truly are a man of many talents.

[tb911]

Wow! That is pretty cool. Will you autograph mine?

Curious though, why a pseudonym at all?

[ttweed]

Curious though, why a pseudonym at all?

The names have all been changed to protect the guilty, Tom.... Nah, it's just a story...none of it is really true....

Seriously, though, besides wanting a cooler nickname, I like the tradition of nom de plume in literature, and didn't write it for the notoriety. I also wanted something uniquely descriptive for my work. There is already a Thomas Tweed who is a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina (formerly of the University of Miami) who has written several notable non-fiction books, and I didn't want to be confused with him.

I originally thought I would just drop my last name and use Thomas Parks, but it turns out that name is already taken too by a guy who writes Christian Cantatas, Anthems, & Ballet Music.

After a little more brainstorming and some internet searching, I came up with Stewart Parks and liked it. I bought that domain name, too, and parked it, just in case...

TT

[John Straub]

Tom, that's very cool! Congratulations...I can't wait to read it.

And welcome to the "Shameless Pluggers"

John

[Otto]

Congratulations Tom, you Renassaince man