Kage Alan Blog

Dear Per Gessle and Marie Fredriksson,

I know your latest album, Traveling, reflects your time during the Charm School tour, but as I’ve listened to it, I’ve been doing a little reflecting of my own. You see, Roxette has been in my life since I was a college freshman back in 1988 and heard the first chords of The Look on the radio. Even the b-side of the cassette single, Silver Blue, was magic! And that’ll be a word–magic–you’ll hear me bring up quite a bit where Roxette is concerned. Why? Because in the years that followed, I’d scour record shows and import music stores for rare vinyl releases and, shortly to come, CD singles with rare b-sides. It was at one such store no longer in business called Grand Rapids Compact Disc that they saved a genuine first edition copy of your Pearls of Passion album for me. That album played a huge part in how I came to befriend, date and eventually marry my husband. See? Magic.
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What follows this intro is the result of a couple crappy nights of sleep, some dodgy days with dad out in public, and an overall need to let some poison out of my system. I tried to go to sleep Sunday night and finally gave up after a few hours. It wasn’t happening and my brain needed a download. I switched on the laptop around 1 a.m. and decided to just let the chips fall where they may. Someone on a Facebook group had referred to me as an underdog, so I started with that thought and let it blow out of proportion from here. Keep in mind (if you do decide to read this) that I was being emotional and, at times, probably overly honest. It’s also barely edited. Barely.

Here we go…
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I have this friend. She’s a fellow author. And if you say the word “pirate” around her, this former law enforcement officer’s trigger finger literally starts twitching. Then comes the rage. Ah, but the lovely G.A. Hauser has a reason for her reaction and it has to do with the sheer amount of money being stolen from her due to pirate torrent sites offering her eBooks for free. Writing for a smaller market already reduces the amount of royalties we can make–and believe me, we don’t make much–so this hurts when it happens. It’s happened to me and I’m not nearly as big a name as most. Our fight against pirate sites is also common knowledge between authors and our readers who interact with us in person or through social media. Imagine my surprise last week when someone posted this on my Facebook wall: “Well, since no one can police ‘piracy’ and you can download programs for secure downloading or use a proxy server, who is dumb enough to PAY for eBooks at all?”
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Finally getting my guy to answer a few interview questions turned out better than I’d hoped. The blog post about him received more than double the amount of traffic I usually bring in. I mentioned this to him, which prompted the response “Bet you wish you wouldn’t have asked me to behave. I might have brought in more if I’d replied to them like I do to you.” Yes, Pookie is now enjoying the idea of considering himself an entertainer. Well, if insulting your audience works for Don Rickles and Lisa Lampanelli, then maybe he does have a future in it. More important than his post-retirement aspirations, though, is that this was the first weekend we’d had together since the wedding and you know what that means!
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Friends have teased me over the years about some of the pictures I’ve had the opportunity to take with some rather well-known faces. Believe me, it was chance and circumstance that lead to most of these. As for the rest? I’ll admit that being in the right place at the right time takes a bit of skill, but it’s so worthwhile! No, I’m not an opportunist. There’s just some pretty awesome people out there who should get to know me…I mean who I should get to know. Yeah…that’s my story and I’m sticking with it.
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