All the things the new year brings

Hello everyone and welcome to the fourth year of Ben Trube, Writer!

Yay!

*applause* *applause*

It might seem like a while since we talked regularly, and indeed in November and December things were getting a bit lean, but the New Year is a chance to hit the reset and renew button. You’ll be seeing that in the coming weeks as I work to revamp the site and bring in some new features and categories that will help you to find those old posts you love the mosts, and all the brand new and exciting things I’ll be writing for you in the coming year.

A couple of new features to look out for:

• Friday Reviews: Each Friday I’ll review two books (usually comic books, graphic novels or manga). Generally this will be stuff that I think you’d like though occasionally if something really popular is really bad I might have to take it to task (i.e. Pretty Deadly).
• Trube on Tech Tuesdays: Most Tuesdays I’ll write a brief how-to guide on some technical task. It might be about e-books, or some new piece of software I’ve been playing with, or more general guides on navigating the technological life. Questions and suggestions for topics are greatly appreciated (I should have a special page on the site gathering all these posts up and running in the coming weeks).
• A new serialized story: Can’t wait for Surreality (since the author seems to be taking forever to get it finished)? I know it’s been a while since I’ve really put any fiction on the site and I’ve missed that. In that spirit I’ve got a great story I’ll be showing you a chapter at a time starting next Thursday and adding a new chapter every other week. Unlike other blogs that do serial narratives, this story will be available both in individual chapter and compiled versions for you to read on the eReader or tablet of your choice absolutely free! (who wants to read that long on a computer anyway?)
• Writing Wednesdays: Updates on current projects or thoughts on the writing life. Again questions or suggestions welcome!

Mondays and every other Thursday will cover the hodge-podge of other topics, and sometimes we’ll do theme weeks, cross-blog events, or other special features.

Also, as some of you have noticed, the Fractal Bundle is no longer available for sale (and hasn’t been for a while sadly). The folks over at Bundle Dragon have instead decided to focus on their Loudr.fm product. You can still buy Fractals: A Programmer’s Approach and Fractals You Can Draw in the Amazon store, but I also wanted to share some of the bundle content with you in a way you could all enjoy. In that spirit I’ve uploaded a new gallery of 125 fractal images exclusive to the bundle onto this site. You can get to them from the fractals tab or by clicking here.

Also today and tomorrow only get Fractals You Can Draw for FREE for your Kindle. These are some of the most popular posts still on the blog, and they’ve been reformatted for your eReaders and tablets.

Let’s have a great year, and when we get to the end with all the wassailing and the nogging and the turkey armageddoning, let’s get together and do it all again next year too.