Month: July 2018

Difficult Decisions

As the title suggests, I’m struggling with two difficult decisions.

First: All of my books and stories are currently enrolled in Kindle Select, which is to say they’re exclusive to Amazon. The upside to this are the promotional tools available and, more importantly, the option to enroll in Kindle Unlimited.  I recently took a look at my account, and saw that almost half of my income from my ebooks – such as it is – is from pages read on Kindle Unlimited.  The downside is that they’re exclusive to Amazon.  Amazon is 75-85% of the ebook market, but still, I personally know people who don’t have access to Kindle for one reason or another.  So my choice was between maximizing the use I got out of the single largest market for ebooks, or trying to have as broad a base as possible by publishing in as many venues as possible.  Until recently, that choice was actually pretty easy, since the one site I knew of that allowed me to publish to multiple platforms in a semi-efficient manner, Smashwords, is a serious pain in the neck.  Formatting a document to publish there involves working through a 100+-page style instruction manual, or hiring someone to do it for you.  But now a friend has introduced me to Draft2Digital, which publishes in multiple platforms and formats (including Kindle), but allows you to simply upload a Word document and then handles the formatting for you.  That made the decision harder.  Now that one is as easily accomplished as the other, do I go for the broadest possible base, or most effective use of the platform that “only” covers 75-85% of the market?

Second: I am currently working on an urban fantasy novel called City of Dreams, which is set in the same setting as Dreams of the Boardwalk. City of Dreams is going to be a full-length novel, not a novella like Boardwalk, and I’m already about 200 pages in.  Would it be foolish of me to start posting excerpts and chapters on this site?  How about the entire first draft, chapter by chapter and excerpt be excerpt?  On the one hand, it’s publicity and proofreading all in one, and I always work better and faster when I know there are people waiting to read my work.  On the other, am I losing potential buyers of the finished product if I let them read even the first draft?

On a related note, I have the beginnings of a slasher novel that could go up chapter-by-chapter in the grindhouse. Anyone interested in seeing that?

And the third isn’t a decision so much as something I’m just worried about. I’ve recently come into a bit of money, and I’ve decided to use it to promote my writing.  The thing is, I’m not sure what the most effective use of that money would be.  I would very much like to turn my writing into a side-hustle worthy of the name (a career is too much to hope for), and the worst thing that could happen is to spend all that money and find myself no better off than I was before…unless it’s for the money to slowly dribble away on bills and little things and accomplish nothing at all.

Advice on any of the above would be welcome.

New Pages Added To Promotional Artwork!

Two new pages have been added to the Promotional Art page, specifically to Angelina and Vicki At The Last.  If you look at that picture and want to know more about those brave, frightened, extraordinary young women, you can find the backstory for Angelina here, and for Vicki right here.

Check it out!

We Are The Old Ones

It’s a very common trope in science fiction: humanity are newcomers to the cosmic scene.  There are empires out there that are older than the existence of our species, or even our planet.  Their technology makes ours look like toys.  Their knowledge and intelligence makes us look like children.  Their personal abilities make us look like puny, feeble creatures.  Sometimes that makes us the scrappy, up-and-coming newcomers that have something the other species have lost, other times – if the writer really wants to rub it in – we are primitive, violent, superstitious savages.  In the right kind of sci-fi (and some horror), some aliens might be literally beyond our comprehension.

It does make a certain amount of sense.  After all, the universe is very old, and we’re only new arrivals on our own planet.  Surely other intelligent life has arisen in the vast reaches of time between now and the Big Bang.  But that raises the question – scientifically expressed in the Fermi Paradox – where are the aliens?  Is there some barrier that prevents spacefaring societies from developing…or life from developing in the first place?

The thought made me very sad.  Afraid for our own future, certainly, but more, the universe seemed dreadfully lonely and sad if we were alone in it.

Then, at the urging of an online friend, I saw this:

(Skip to 9:15 if you don’t want to watch the whole thing)

This was…a revelation.

It seems that the universe, like a living creature, might need to reach a certain stage of maturity before it can have children, and our planet – and thus we – came into being very early in that stage of maturity.

We may be the universe’s firstborn.

We are the Old Ones, the First Ones, the Precursors.  We are the Shadows and the Vorlons.

Before, I thought it would be unfathomably sad and lonely if we were the only intelligent life in the universe.  But if we’re only alone because our younger brothers and sisters and others haven’t been born yet, that’s not so bad.

I just hope that when they do come along, we’ve become wise enough to be a kinder big brother than Cthulhu.

My Perfect Life

So I was walking the beach at Coney Island and I figured out my perfect life.

I’m already two-thirds of the way there, believe it or not.  I’m happy with where I am and who I’m with.  I married the right person, and she seems to think she did too, and that counts for more than anything else.  So call it halfway there just with that, with each of the other two things counting for a quarter.  The next factor is “where I am”, so suffice it to say that our new apartment is better than we even dared to hope for when we decided to rent it.  There’s space and air, storage space in the basement so we don’t have to stuff everything in closets or leave it stacked in corners, a peaceful neighborhood with lots of neat restaurants in it, and it’s all within easy reach of friends and family and parks and our favorite movie theatre and Coney Island.  What more could anyone ask for in that regard?

All that’s missing for my perfect life is to be happy with what I do.
Continue reading “My Perfect Life”