The Panchen Lama, meaning “Great Scholar,” is the highest-ranking Lama after the Dalai Lama in the Gelugpa sect of Tibetan Buddhism. The sect controlled western Tibet from the 16th century until the establishment of Chinese sovereignty in 1951.
On November 27, 2007, while attending an interfaith conference in the north Indian city of Amritsar, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama suggested he might not be reborn, ending a 600-year-old tradition ofreincarnation as a small boy after his death.
Since I am having so much fun and success with maintaining my blog, why not post the progress on my newest novel on the world wide web? The best promotion for your first novel is the release of your second, and I didn’t have the patience to wait that long.
Here we go again, yet another web site that offers copyrighted material for free on their website. According to torrent2crazy.com my book “A Comprehensible Guide to Controller Area Network” has already been downloaded more than 27,000 times (Click on picture to the left to enlarge)! If that number is correct, it translates into a sales volume of roughly $220,000!
Through my research I found that the market for nonfiction on writing and publishing is cluttered ad nauseam. The majority of these works are – excuse my French – full of crap. Then I remembered the saying “Don’t anger me or I will write a novel about you”, and that is what I am currently doing. There is no better weapon than writing a novel about the industry. They deserve it.
I first heard the song The Boys of Barr Na Sraide in Ireland on the small isle of Inishbofin off the coast of Galway. My wife’s grandmother was born here and she immigrated to the United States in the early 1920s. We had visitied Paddy Joe and Regina King, some distant cousins of my wife’s. Their son, Peadar (the Irish version of Peter), had shown me a CD by Colm O’Donnell, Farewell to Evening Dances, which he was very fond of and I share that feeling now. The title of Colm O’Donnell’s CD is taken from the song The Hill of Knacknashee, another sentimental and lyrical ballad on the CD. I shamelessly copied the idea and took a line out of The Boys of Barr Na Sraide, the line that goes “And when the hills were bleeding and rifles were aflame…”, to use it as the title for my book “The Bleeding Hills“.
