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Showing posts from May, 2018

Gimme back my bullets

"Gimme back my bullets" If you grew up in the 70's, you're probably familiar with the Lynyrd Skynyrd song of that title, but you may not know what it referenced, and might have thought it was about literal bullets being fired from a gun and the singer wanting you to return them to him, adding insult to injury perhaps?   Billboard magazine tracked song popularity, and when a song moved quickly up the charts, they would print an icon of a bullet next to it, so a disc jockey might say "This is song number 20 with a bullet, rising fifteen spots in this week's polls." Lynyrd Skynyrd wanted to feel the rush of having songs climbing fast in the charts, thus writing that song. Being an author on Amazon, I get a similar sense of rush when I see I'm rising in the ratings. As I write this, my author rank is 72,769; which means that is precisely how many other authors are more popular than I am on Amazon, as of this instant. Their handy chart g

"Lots of words and some are even good"

"Lots of words and some are even good" The last few days I've had the luxury of spending lots of time writing. I'm working hard to finish up "Black Swan Antithesis" (Book 2 of the Black Swan Planet trilogy), and am about 90% done with the first draft. My original goal for this story was to complete the first draft in "May, 2018" and I feel confident that will happen, unless something unexpected happens and takes me away from the computer for days on end. Keep in mind the first draft is rough - it's the equivalent of me telling the story to myself the first time. While the plot and situations will remain, I expect to make significant changes to descriptions, details and word choices. For a draft I don't worry about repeating a word twice in a paragraph or minor plot holes - those get fixed in my re-writes. For those who read the first book in the series, I'll tell you Raka returns as well as some of the original characters, and s

Why write?

Over the years I've met hundreds of people and through small-talk, I end up mentioning that I'm an author. Responses can be typically broken down to three categories: 1. Meh. (Quick change of subject, no interest whatsoever) 2. Mild interest. (Sometimes even a "where can I find your stuff?) 3. Interest in the financial aspect of writing. (How much can you make as an author? Often the follow-up question, then why write?) Somewhere on the internet (and you can't lie there!) I read the average author can expect about $250 off a novel. Now I know enough about averages to know that means a lot of people make nothing and a few people make millions. Having said that, why would I spend hundreds of hours creating a work with an expected payback rate of perhaps 30 cents per hour? Because every once in a while, an author makes it big. I'm still waiting for that to happen, but I've seen the next best thing - random people reaching out to me to tell me how much they e