Blog: Ash Tree

Finally created an author site for myself. Take a look: henrybaum.com .

I started a new blog devoted to the most amazing new phenomenon of being able to hear songs broken down by track: Studio Multitracks .

Now blogging at The American Book of the Dead .

Please check out the newly-formed book collective, Backword Books . As it says there: Backword Books is a collective of self-published authors. We're not quite a literary press because all of us use different services to publish (Lightning Source, Lulu, iUniverse, and CreateSpace to name a few). In short, we're a unique collective that has yet to be done on any large scale, using a medium that is losing stigma and gaining credibility. We all believe in our writing, and it's been tested by those who know well: readers [...]

There's something very perverse about the Letterman-Palin fued, and the perversion's coming from the Palin side. Todd Palin already said that Letterman shouldn't joke about "raping" his daughter, as if all sex is rape. They had to clarify that he meant "statutory rape." And then today Palin said, I would say that you and anybody else are extremely naive to believe that very convenient excuse of David Letterman's the other day. He took a couple of days for him to think of that excuse that, oh, no, he wasn't talking about [...]

I believe the children are our future...What's striking about this Max Blumenthal video is not the racism against Obama, it's finding out that Jews can be this stupid. On a related apocalyptic note, this is very awesome and soon to be released: Update : After the shooting at the Holocaust Museum, I feel bad about the Jew quip, even if I was saying that Jews are usually smart. I'm Jewish by the way, or I [...]

An unnecessary review, why spend so much time on a kid's movie? Because people are for some reason loving this movie. And I have to say there's something strange and sort of wrong that there were more adults at the screening for Up than parents with kids – including Ray Liotta, though he was with his kids. I can deal with the fact that in the first ten minutes you find out the wife is barren and can't have children – even though my daughter looked over at me and asked, "Why is she [...]

This is fascinating... Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News , World News , and News about the Economy

Yes, I'm trying to play with Google search queries, but I like how this looks: Besides ebook uploading, I got a new job, working for Savings.com . Makes me very happy - an hourly job, with benefits, still working at home. No more hustling so hard to find freelance writing work. I was getting very nervous because a freelance outlet I was working for went from content writing to web design. I've seen countless web start-ups fall through, but this one's on the [...]

Yesterday I was feeling particularly toxic, which was worrying me. As I've written about, my health isn't so great . Last night I had a dream about beating up my ex-wife's new boyfriend, who turned out to be very tan and sinewy (haven't met the guy), and then hanging out with Henry Rollins and my daughter, where diamonds littered the pavement. This morning I woke up feeling fine and refreshed, even though I woke up at 6:30 and didn't actually get a lot of sleep. I think my health has as much to do with [...]

Uploading North of Sunset to all the ebook sites, in preparation for doing the same with The American Book of the Dead . Here it is from Scribd : North of Sunset Publish at Scribd or explore others: [...]

If you haven't read Dan Baum's (no relation) Twitter tale about working for and getting fired by The New Yorker , it is good reading. $90,000 a year for 30,000 words? Incredible. I should be a millionaire for the number of words I write a year – albeit nothing 1% as good or as necessary as The New Yorker (web content). But seems an absurd figure for the # of staff writers they have. A window into writing on that level: New Yorker stories are so [...]

Thanks to Smashwords , you can now download North of Sunset in a number of formats - you set the price.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart M - Th 11p / 10c Moral Kombat thedailyshow.com Daily Show Full Episodes Economic Crisis Political Humor

Potentially burning a bridge. Do I really want to criticize my current agent? Probably not, but do I really think I'm going to publish traditionally again? Probably not. If I do, it will be because a book I've put out myself was successful, in which case the criticism of my agent today won't mean much. But my agent rejected my novel based on typos. She mentioned other things, but the fact that she mentioned typos at all is extremely very puzzling. Would an editor reject a book based on typos? It would [...]

J.J. Abram's dad was the landlord of the house I grew up in. I went to high school with writer Alex Kurtzman, a year below me: Alex Kurtzman & Bob Orci Interview - Star Trek from FirstShowing.net on Vimeo .

I wrote one of my favorite posts I've written for the Self-Publishing Review. One of the reasons I'm so attracted to self-publishing is that it is so maligned. The same goes for UFOs. Something with such profound implications is treated as a joke. Self-Publishing is the UFO of literature. People mock it, denigrate it, but at its core it is such a great development: all writers have the ability to reach readers. No one is without a voice, no one is locked out. That type of free expression [...]

In my novel, The Golden Calf , the lead character, Ray, gets a job working as a security guard in a liberal arts college and becomes infatuated with a student named Helen. He begins writing her letters: You don't know me. I've seen you around campus and I'd like to meet you but I don't know how to go about doing it. I'm shy in my own way. The reason I'm writing this is because I think we have something in common. We both want something out of life and we can't [...]

The movie "District 9" may have the best viral marketing campaign ever. Check out: D-9.com http://www.multinationalunited .com http://www.mnuspreadslies.com http://www.mathsfromouterspace .com/ And a protest video:

A little bit about where some of my misanthropy comes from. And some of my urgency. I've had one of the most fucked up years on record. Not relative to people who live in a warzone, but relative to my life. Last winter I found out that my health had deteriorated considerably. It's something I'd known about since my early twenties, but my body was failing to a deeper degree. I have kidney disease. It's something I've rarely written about here because it's sometimes not healthy to obsess about it. But it's [...]