I work from home. Have since March 2018. For me, the sudden “work from home” that everyone else fell into earlier this year wasn’t much of a hiccup. Instead, book sales tended to sag (if you weren’t in one of the subscription services, which saw a boost when people were suddenly worried about expenses). Hoping they will recover in Dec.

But for the last six months or so I have been navigating a new world where we weren’t ever going out to dinner, weren’t doing much shopping, and generally staying away from everyone. Didn’t help when Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) got what we think was a mild case that knocked her down for a few days in April and gave her about a month of brain fog. Hard isolation at that point, but I never developed symptoms.

So what was the summer like? My favorite restaurant–Krain Cafe just north of Enumclaw, WA– went for a while to take-out only, so I would go down on Friday afternoon and get a pair of breakfasts I could heat up, partly to support them and partly to get me out. My regular D&D gaming went away, but I found a different online/zoom group to play with, remote only for a while, although we have met in person a few times.

Mostly, for me, it was never going into town. I have the farm based on studies I did in the late 80s and early 90s talking about the possible fall of the american republic in 2020. (Yes, that long ago the trend lines of what was possibly coming were apparent, if you studied certain things.) I am away from everyone, remote, and generally quiet. 6+ acres, more than half trees and ponds. Fruit to harvest in the summer/fall. Herbs for the garden to cook with. Not survivalist mode, but we went into 2020 prepared for storms that would knock out power and trap us for a week at a time. Coffin freezer with half a pig and other things frozen. Etc. (Seattle, by the way, might have made the news this summer. She would have been able to smell the tear gas clouds from her old house up on Capital Hill downtown. Possibly breathe them.)

But I used to write all morning and then head into town in the early afternoon to run errands. That went away.

Today, I actually got another little bit of normalcy back. Had to run down to drop off ballots at the drop box. (Not trusting the Postal Service as long as those jackasses run it, regardless of what the rank and file can do to mitigate stupidity.) Went by and dropped off recycling as well. (I burn anything paper, compost anything organic, recycle anything we can, and end up going to the dump about every 4-6 weeks for four cans of trash.)

Decided to hit the pawn shop at the east end of Enumclaw while I was down there. They bought out a couple of video stores at some point, and have something like two shipping containers of dvds and blueray to get rid of. Most of it is weird schlock, as one might expect, but I keep a spreadsheet of my video library and a short list of things I’m looking for to fill in gaps. Like having the Fraser Mummy movies 2 & 3 but not 1. Found that today. Got a couple of other oddities, like a double feature of 2001 and Clockwork Orange. Haven’t seen the former in ages and not sure I’ve ever seen the latter, although I have read the English edition (with the extra chapter the American version chopped off the end.)

I have a Synology NAS on an airgapped local network. 4@6Tb drives in a RAID 5, or a metric shit-ton of space, so I have ripped every dvd I still own (after a massive purge I occasionally regret) and then go back to fill it in and buy/rip new disks. We don’t have cable. I hardly ever watch entertainment on the screen (tv shows, sports, etc.). But I do watch movies occasionally, and I have a low trust of the big streaming services. The things you want to watch will vanish one day, because there will peak out at around 20 such services, and everyone will hoard their IP rather than making it generally available.

I can watch whatever I find and own. Better this way. Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) isn’t sure what caper she’s going to write one of these days, but her writer-brain has her rewatching all of Leverage, since it is now ripped and she can just pull a few episodes at a time to watch while doing other things. I need to get back into the habit, but there are few tv shows I want to watch. Might buy all of Star Trek TOS and TAS just so I can rip those and work back through them, but that might take me years.

I don’t binge, because in the summer my afternoons are working on the farm. Winter I’m a little more stuck inside, especially this coming one where I expect infection spikes because every time I go out I see idiots who don’t cover their nose. Sometimes, they don’t even mask, but a lot of places have gotten stricter now that the state has started cracking down and issuing fines to businesses.

But, you know, idiots.

So old stuff, mostly to put information in the backbrain. I wrote a book one in a new epic space opera series where the bridge of the massive starship is absolutely taken from the floor plans to Space: 1999, because it was completely different from any other SF I can remember, where they are always either WW2 submarines or TOS/TNG for design. Both work, but that means everyone else looks alike. Sounds alike. Is alike.

Yuck.

So today I got to have an almost normal afternoon. Shopped with my drapery mask on (that’s what the cloth was from in my pile when I needed to sew something that fit me comfortably). Squirted the hand sanitizer as I paid. Brought home three new cases with all manner of weird.

Getting into a new normal, if the old one is forever gone.

What are you doing to build a future instead of lamenting a past?

Seriously. Or rather, not so serious, as it were. When you open an anthology call with a one sentence theme, and challenge people to out-weird each other, the results can be strange. And a lot of fun.

As of October 1, I have put out the open call for Issue #4: “Cloak and Dagger”

However you choose to interpret that, mind you. An Interpretation of Moles should have cured you of expecting stories on rails. We don’t do that here.

1. An Interpretation of Moles
2. I Like My Science…MAD
3. Nuns With Guns

Stories are due in my hands by the end of October 31. We’ll publish it on Dec 1, if all goes well, so there is no slack in the schedule. I expect professional to participate, and I judge professionalism entirely on the ability to respond to email promptly and with the information I need or questions.

I get tired of the [Level Monster Issue]

That’s where someone gets an email needing information, or a response, but cannot bring themselves to push the button and say something. Seriously, there are not many things in this world that I find more annoying than that. When it comes time to publish, everyone had to hit deadlines less than a week apart. I can’t hold an anthology like this. (I can, but choose not to, because either you are a pro, or you are junior varsity. I know some big name authors who let act like pissy dilettantes on deadlines. I won’t work with again.)

Since I announce the BWP Anthologies generally on Facebook for now, I figured I might let people know about it here, in the wider arc of my voice. Or a different audience. Whatever.

If you have questions about submitting, ping me. As with the previous ones, we’re going to have fun. No reason you shouldn’t join us.

🙂

On top of everything else in 2020, I had to rebuild the barn roof. Took the opportunity to clean out the middle bay of the barn itself. That’s the one with a lot of personal stuff, but some things have gone a little wrong.

My Mom lived with me for a few years, back when I was still in Renton and in the process of building out on the farm. When she moved back to St. Louis, she took what she could fit in her car and left me with the rest. It went into the barn until I had the spoons to deal with it.

Moving out here after Donna died meant dealing with a lot of personal stuff. More spoons. She was an artist, so I have some of her drawings, but have been slowly cycling most of them off to the step-daughters to handle for the various grands and eventual great-grands.

This was also the summer we had the wood house restained, inside and out, so I had to take everything down and move it out. Then I got to put it back, but Fabulous Publisher Babe™ and I decided that it didn’t have to go “right back” to what it had been. So we kinda moved into the house again, almost from scratch. Changed things around.

New art on the walls, with a bunch of old art that either went to the daughters (if Donna’s) or hauled off to Value Village to recycle. Books gone away as we moved shelves around.

Then I had to go through the barn stuff, all of which had been there at least six years. My Mother did not pack her boxes particularly well, so they got damp, which meant mildew. It also meant mice climbing in and chewing things. Old books of no particular value, and yucky, so I burned them. Salvaged what I could, but not everything could be saved. Nature of the beast.

Fire is the best way to cleanse some of those things.

As I opened old boxes, I also found a few containing stuff I had either forgotten about, or had been looking for and unable to find because they were back and underneath.

I used to be a prolific letter writer. Found letters from friends dating back to the early and mid 80s. Some of those people I haven’t seen in 30-35 years. Maybe “never heard from them again” after I went off to LA for grad school and didn’t take hardly any connections with me.

You could to that in those days. Just move and eventually the address forwarding expired, so letters were returned undeliverable. Phone numbers used to be geographical, so you had to get a new one when you moved and maybe it was unlisted.

Who knows who might have tried to reach me after 1990 and failed? Other letters from folks I did talk to in the 90s, when I was in California, or later when I left and went back to Kansas, before ending up in Seattle in 1997.

But I had saved a lot of correspondence from old girlfriends. None of it less than 25 years old. Most of them I couldn’t locate today if my life depended on it. There are a number of “And I never saw her again after 1997” in my past.

Those went into the fire.

I don’t have children of my own. I inherited grown step-daughters who are five months to five years younger than me, but they have lives and I’m only kind of tangential to them. They are at least all still friends, twelve years after their mother died. I count that as a win.

So I burned things.

It it liberating, putting things to the torch. All that stuff holds you down, a feather at a time. You don’t appreciate how much it weighs until one day you cast it into the purifying fires and call it done.

“Hey, whatever happened to him?” questions can go unanswered, because only a few strangers from that distant past know how to find me today. And we’re all probably better off not knowing, because then you lose the mystique.

Fire is an agency of chaos, reducing the order of words on paper to flames. That which was because unknown, lost forever. It does not bring me guilt, because I made peace with myself a long time ago, and all I can do for some people is silently apologize and not bother them.

I eventually chose to be happy, but those old letters shined a light on the guy I was 25 or 35 years ago.

But they are not who I am, nor who I choose to be.

They are merely images on a wall.

Pictures of who I used to be.

Faces.

I live in a highly redneck section of King County, Washington. Most people think of this as the Left Coast and Starbucks sipping hippies (not entirely untrue) but if you go by zipcodes, I’m pretty sure this area went red by a significant margin in 2016. I knew that when I bought the property to move out here from where I used to be in the white, middle-class, red districts of Fairwood (a neighborhood of Renton, WA) in 2010.

Part of my reasoning then (and going back as far as 1988 if you want) was that 2020 was going to be a terrible inflection point in US history, for reasons I have discussed in other places and won’t rehash here. Didn’t want to be in “The City” when what I saw coming caught fire.

I got lucky and found this particular property in 2010. The previous owner had died at the end of 2006, and his various kids had been trying to sell it, but there were “issues.” It had even gone so far as serious negotiations from another person, but he got chased off by the neighbors, in a polite way. Another Microsoft millionaire type, set to move out here and “change everything.”

The land is 6.5 acres, at the end of a cul-de-sac. I have a neighbor, E, above me, who originally bought most of his section of land in 1963 and then sold it off in chunks over the decades, especially when she and her husband divorced and he left. I remember E explaining to me one day, early on, that one of these days the Feds would be coming for her and it would be Ruby Ridge all over again. The others in the conversation just nodded and agreed, so you have a pretty good idea who my neighbors on three sides are.

Fourth side are 60s hippies that mostly grew old but are still a little weird. I got lucky when I was getting serious about buying by randomly starting at the Hippie household to meet the prospective neighbors. R & C told me about the guy just south of me who scares everyone, and what to say to him.

Mind you, when I got to the top of his driveway, he was already standing in his front door, pot belly all shirtless and deployed, and I’m assuming a shotgun out of sight. He’s like that.

“You G?” I yell from my truck.

“Who wants to know?” he yells back.

“R & C told me I should come up here and say hello,” I answer. “Looking to buy M’s old place.”

M had put down a foundation and covered it, planning to put a modular home on it back in 1991. But then he found out that the school board would charge him a building levy for that, and he threw a screaming, hissing fit (as I got the story 20 years later). Ended up living for the next 16 years out of a 26’ gooseneck horse trailer, with a 55 gallon drum set in the ground for a septic tank. Really serious, gold-fringe-on-the-flag sort of fellow, if you get my drift.

There are a lot of those folks around here. But you know what I’ve seen in the last ten years?

Gentrification. The Safeway in Maple Valley (town wjhen I go west) started carrying exotic cheeses. When they built a Fred Meyers (kind of like a SuperWalmart with regular stuff AND groceries) it had a huge cheese booth. Wrapped on three sides of about ten feet each, displaying maybe a hundred weird cheeses. That’s my barometer of hipster around here, as you can tell.

Then two plots right around there got developed and a bunch of McMansions got built in the stretch 2010-2016. More recently, a couple of new apartment developments have gone in.

The world in town is changing. I’m still out in the weird, red zones, past a wilderness that can’t be developed because Kent, WA and Seattle, WA bought both sides of the road for several miles and fenced them in. I’m in a pocket that is still trapped in the 1950s in many ways.

But the gentrification progresses.

With the pandemic, nobody can really go out to eat. For a long stretch, all the restaurants were take out only. And we did, supporting our favorites. More recently, they can open, but at half capacity. Enumclaw, WA, the city I usually go to, closed off several side streets and put up pavilion tents and rented tables and chairs, turning those streets into sidewalk cafe seating so that the restaurants on Cole and other streets could serve the same number of folks as before. Hopefully, they’ll live. Some good ones I enjoy.

But it has been ‘food trucks’ that was not on my pandemic bingo card. Usually, they do the fair circuit in the summer, but all those are shut down, so neighborhoods have organized to have trucks rotate through. (I have found some fun new eats that way, and we’ve kept them in business.)

So this last week, Ravensdale, WA had their usual Wednesday Truck event. New burger truck I haven’t had before (pretty good, too). But next to them was a truck doing bubble teas, smoothies, and other exotic drinks.

Exotic to the locals, that is. Normal international fare when my wife lived on Capital Hill in downtown Seattle and we could walk all sorts of places.

I got boba with my burger. Brown sugar, milk, ice, boba. Stir. A hint bland, but that was because they didn’t have any good fruit syrups to add.

But this is gold-fringe, You-Can’t-Make-Me-Wear-A-Mask, crazy hard right wing country. And the bubble tea truck did pretty good business. Not as good as good, old-fashioned American Cheese burgers, even with that weird Waygu meat. But there was a bubble tea truck penetrating the consciousness of this zip code.

Makes me all warm and fuzzy to think about, because it means that the folks moving out here are not white, blue-collar, right-wing voters. The city might develop services. Places. Things.

Enumclaw has a downtown. That’s why I go there. Maple Valley is closer, but it is Generica Suburbia on the highway, and not really a place. Some good restaurants. The library. A trail that has been converted from an old railroad bed.

Nothing like a downtown where you could walk around on a Sunday afternoon. Strip malls and fast food make up most of the city. I dream of that changing, as well, but I’m not holding my breath. Maybe another decade.

But this week I had a moment of hope, in a year of suck. Boba, from a food truck, in Ravensdale, Washington.

Will wonders never cease?

August has kind of sucked. Not terrible, but just a drag on all aspects. First we got the house restained inside and out at the end of July, which was lovely, but required me to tear the house apart so the guy could get to all the walls and ceiling. Still not back to normal. Not sure when I will be.

He finished up on a Tuesday having spent most of a week. That Wednesday I started tearing part of the roof off the barn to replace where it had rotted. Hotter than usual, so we worked first thing in the morning until it got hot. Got some writing done in the afternoon/evening, but I was usually just exhausted so I maybe would get a thousand words or so. Took Saturday and Sunday off, but those were both just recovery days because I had no spoons left, after tearing out the old deck, replacing several ribs and the full run of horizontals, and then re-decking.

Monday/Tuesday were spent reshingling the new roof, with Tuesday being the first rain in a month while we’re on the roof working. Wednesday was a recovery day. Thursday we drove to Portland from Seattle and helped my cousin move stuff out of the new house and into a storage unit, after she had messed up her back. We drove back Thursday after a late lunch. Friday and Saturday I was social.

This last Sunday I had a pajamas day. Those are the days I don’t put on anything except my pjs and don’t leave the house. Managed 7500 words to finish off a novel. That was good. Had some bad things happen in the afternoon, and I just kind of all just boiled over.

Monday, I got up intent on writing a new short story in one of my existing universes, and needed to edit the previous story in it. Got the editing done and had no words. None. Not even a glimmer.

Took the rest of the day sideways. Went for a long drive with the music up and the phone set to airplane mode so nobody would text me and use up my last spoon or get on my last nerve.

Did work out an entire new universe I want to write in and planned some stories. The next three issues of Boundary Shock Quarterly that I’m working into (14-16) were Space Marines, Cargo Wars, and Wandering Monsters. Writer brain looked at those and framed a setting, an arc, and I came up with a character to put into all of them sequentially. (Later, it laid out for me a multi-novel space marine arc to write. Go me?)

Tuesday I actually wrote. 4000 words for the first time in more than two weeks. Today (Wednesday) I wrote 5000 to finish that story off. Tomorrow, I plan to start the next one. Friday I am social again, so might not get many words done in the morning and will circle back in the afternoon. Same with Sunday.

For a guy that thrives on averaging 4000 words per day over incredibly long stretches, I am more than 13,000 words off my accustomed pace. Until this today, I wasn’t sure I would hit my usual 100,000 words for the month. Just above 90k right now, after generating 16,500 just since Sunday morning.

Last year, I had a stretch about the same time, but for different reasons. This year I am just emotionally exhausted, and that’s taken a physical toll. Some of you have seen my other blog posts to see how far out of true I’ve gotten. Hip and lower back are hurting today. Again, physical response to emotional.

I can say definitively that I have made changes. Will continue to make them. Have cauterized a number of people out of my existence this summer who were too negative or offensive. Done dealing with that. And those people. Forever.

Have had too many drama queens who thought that I gave a shit because I hadn’t just jumped in with both feet to just destroy them. Have come close with a few of them, just because I’d be doing the world a favor to shatter a couple of those people into jagged, little bits of pain that I didn’t have to ever deal with again.

Might, yet. Folks have forgotten to be nice to one another, and I’m largely tired of their drama. The difference in 2020 is that I’ll just write you off and never talk to you again.

Keep that in mind when you are an asshole to people who didn’t deserve it. Like me.

Oh, and keep that shit away from me because I won’t lose any sleep if I destroy your entire psyche, one of these days. Doing the universe a favor.

So for as long as I can remember (at least 35 years, probably longer), I have generally sat down in June and reinvented myself. As I explain to others, I become someone else. This keeps me from getting stodgy and set in my ways. (And, mind you, I was doing this long before I met the Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) and her Anti-Stodgy Campaign.)

Took several years, back in the 80s, to understand the why of the timing, but I finally realized that it had to do with the end of the spring semester and the start of summer. For example, I graduated high school at the end of my junior year (long story) in mid-May and then immediately turned around two weeks later and started college, taking two classes over the summer. (Speech, which blah, and Intro to Geography, which altered the course of my life. Thanks, Dr. Broadway.)

It was always a time to reassess. I didn’t take summers off in college, taking at least one and maybe two classes. The deal I made with the parents was that I would finish. Not when, not where, not how. Took me 3.5 years, with a double major (Philosophy/Epistemology & PolSci/Intl Relations, plus a minor in Geography). 144 credit hours when I needed 120.

To survive the other insanities in my life, I regularly became someone new. You make a list of all the things you are doing. All the things you are interested in, hobbies, habits, whatever. To add 1-2 new ones, you toss 1-2 out the airlock and be done with them.

It’s a cruel thing, especially when some of the things you get rid of turn out to be toxic. Because then you have to rid yourself of the toxic people that came with it. I did this by consciously forgetting a LOT of things. For everyone’s benefit in the long run, let me tell you.

So it’s June. Had come to a tangle in the road and needed to clear it. Gordian Knot, as it were, was the best approach. Again, brutal, but liberating.

Couple of new things, one of which I’ll talk about now, but not really explain until later (or I’d be here all day talking).

I’m 51. (Well, next week, but you get the picture.) I’m getting old. Need to focus on staying limber and mobile, because that’s really the key to a long life. I do shower yoga every morning. Stretching a variety of ways while standing there, in order to loosen things up.

Recently, I’ve added new stretches as part of the new me. Today, I added a new workout. Old one, but something I have fallen off of.

My usual routine is to get up, fix myself breakfast, check the news online, and the write for several hours. I do that 28+ days per month. It works.

But it’s summer. Time to change somethings up.

English King Richard II (1377-1399) passed a law (cite: “Feasts and fasts, an essay on the laws relating to Sundays and other holidays and days of fasting. Edward Vansittart Neale January 1, 1845″)

“In the reign of Richard the Second a law , which , however , seems to have been more of a political than of a religious character , prescribes to servants of husbandry and artificers the use of bows and arrows on Sundays and holidays ; enjoining such to “leave playing at tennis, or football, cartes, dice, casting of the stone, and other importune. games; ” and an act of Henry the Fourth enforced the observance of this law under the penalty of six days’ imprisonment.”

It was eventually repealed, but was on the books for centuries.

This morning, I got up and went out to breakfast. Only person there when they opened. Seated way off by myself when others got there.

Then I went to the gun range where I belong, with the compound bow. Spent a goodly amount of time just firing arrows at the 20 yard target, getting my muscles loose and and figuring out how far the sites had drifted in the epoch since I last went shooting. Stopped when I started to hurt. Will need time to build up muscles, as well as recover muscle memory.

This will become my Tuesday morning tradition for now. Got home and cleaned up. Put everything away. Started writing this blog post, mostly because in the last two weeks, I had to become someone new. The wife just laughs, but she’s been through this with me several times.

Gets me further down the road.

What are you doing to keep yourself young?

So I tend to write in a lot of genres, but a common, overall theme is adventure. One of the things about adventure writing is that everybody doesn’t have to be murder-hobos. I watch too many movies where they seem to measure the gravitas of things by the body count. And heroes aren’t really heroes in the classic because they calmly go about killing everybody they run into without mussing their hair or tearing a seam. Or even feeling especially bad for having a running firefight on a crowded street.

“Richard Stark” taught me a much different way to approach things with Parker. (I’ve read a number of those books, but not all, because nobody ever gets rid of them at a used bookstore and I’m WAY too cheap to pay the sorts of prices that TradPub thinks they can get for a series of books that are older than I am. First pub 1968, by the way.)

Parker lived by a different code in a different era, even though he could be a son of a bitch. From Wikipedia: “A ruthless career criminal, Parker has almost no traditional redeeming qualities, aside from efficiency and professionalism. Parker is callous, meticulous, and perfectly willing to commit murder if he deems it necessary. He does, however, live by one ethical principle: he will not double-cross another professional criminal with whom he is working, unless they try to double-cross him. Should that happen, Parker will unhesitatingly undertake to exact a thorough and brutal revenge.”

In one book, he gets the drop on a man who might report him and undo everything that he’s just managed to do to get even with the people who set him up. Parker points the gun at the guy and directs him to drive. In modern books or movies, the driver of course lunges at the hero at some point, they have a fight, and the npc gets killed. Or forces the hero to shoot him in self-defense.

Parker pulls to the side of the road when he gets where he’s going and gets out, telling the guy to keep driving and forget all this. Minor character, completely irrelevant to the overall plot, but neither Parker nor Westlake see the need to kill him casually or callously. The driver just left and that was that.

I have written some bad characters. And some good characters doing bad things. I try to remember that it is not necessary to kill every peon NPC that you run across. They can run away. They can go home at night. They can live.

Similarly, in the movie The Town (Ben Affleck, 2010), there is a scene where Affleck’s gang are getting away, dressed as nuns with masks. They come around a corner and park the getaway car as they are about to escape and there’s a cop, sitting there in his patrol car, eating a sandwich. One man with a pistol, against four guys with assault rifles and the drop.

What does he do?

The cop very obviously turns his head the other way and watches the scenery, pointedly ignoring the criminals.

They don’t kill him. Everyone recognizes what would have happened had the cop gotten stupid, so he doesn’t. Honor among thieves, sort of, but the man got to go home to his family that night, instead of dying pointlessly.

I’m writing a novel now with a villain who’s not a scenery-chewing sadist. Just a dude, doing what he thinks it right within a fairly twisted cultural matrix. (Soviet Central Asia, 1938, Samarkand, Uzbekistan.) The hero and his sidekick would both kill the guy if they had to, but I’m struck by the realization that everyone might actually get out of this one alive, because nobody has gone to that step where everyone has to go murder hobo.

I wonder what we as a culture have lost over the last however long, that just defeating the villain and throwing him in jail is no longer enough, like it was in the comic books when I was a kid. You can no longer just stop the supervillain from poisoning the reservoir. You must execute him in gory detail to keep him from ever trying again.

We have lost the concept of human redemption, in reducing everything to simply black and white.

Parker was all about gray. I try to keep that in mind when writing Finn, Duff, or Rob. Yasmin. Brannon. Any of the others.

I used to say “they can’t beat me, they can only kill me, and that is an admission on their part that they cannot beat me.” We don’t do that.

Batman in the old days never killed, Michael Keaton notwithstanding. Why is it acceptable now?

What do we need to change so that we can return to the Golden Age where we could defeat someone, and then give them the chance to be redeemed?

A dead man is just dead. He cannot be redeemed. Ever.

What have we become?

So it comes up from time to time, but not everyone hears it, or remembers it.

There are regular and generally accepted “rumors” that publishing on Amazon on a regular rate (“The Pulse”) helps with your overall author ranking, as well as your placement of books in “Also bought” and “You might like” as a way to reward regular product. (And books are just another product on Amazon.)

If you publish something in a genre (preferably in a series) every 30 days, you will get rewarded by the robots in control. I drop something on the 10th of every month. Sometimes more than one thing, depending on writing and editing speed. I have seen the rewards.

There also purports to be a slower pulse, running every 60 days, as well as another one ever 90 days, but my understanding is that they step down in effectiveness quite a bit.

How can you take advantage of this?

Some of you write a lot of short fiction, while others are into novels. If you write short, consider putting together a series character and dropping a new mystery/case every month. In my case, I write science fiction, and tend to write shorts that are parts of a much longer novel, but are not just serialized. Instead, I tell each little piece self-contained as a short story and then will assemble them when I have at least 40,000 words and bring some section of a story to rest.

My Patrons got the first seven stories of Yasmin of the Desert in April. (Technically, they were only supposed to get the first three, but I screwed up and sent the wrong file, so when they noticed I sent them a new novella for May and will find something for June.) Those seven stories will be “Volume/Book One” when I get there. I’v already written #8 and will get through a bunch more over the next year.

If you write novels, my suggestion is that you take a few days a month and dedicate them to some short fiction. Seriously. I appreciate that I write at crazy fast speeds compared to many writers, but I also know several folks who make me look like a slacker. 3-5,000 words will reward you, and you should be able to do that, if you really want to be a writer. (I cannot want this more than you do.

Write a short story every month. Put it up for $0.99. Put them into a collection later, or edit them into a whole novel so you can resell the whole thing, or let people have paper copies.

Why?

The pulse will boost you as an author. I don’t do much advertising on Amazon. Instead, I let the machines put me in front of people. If you get on the pulse, Amazon also sends out email reminders to your fans fairly regularly, letting them know you have a new book and “here’s a link to buy it!”

Free advertising, targeting people who are already following you on Amazon. $0.99 short stories won’t make you rich, but as you build your catalog, it will hook new fans. Especially if you are telling a whole long arc of stories about a character or group. They will get invested. And want to give you money.

I hear regular conversations that people tell me that they cannot get any traction unless they spend a lot of money on advertising. It might work. It might not. I built a lot of my success on the pulse instead of the ad spend, so I wanted to give everyone else options they maybe didn’t know about.

It doesn’t have to be a novel every month. In fact, I’m hoping someone sets down to prove me wrong and writes a twelve-short arc and drops them every month for a year. I’d love to hear your results. And hopefully, you end up with more things generating money.

No book is going to make you rich in the modern age of publishing. Traditionally-published books are dropping zeroes of the back of an advance from 20 years ago. Chances are that you will not be the next JK Rowling or Susan Collins.

Instead, you want to create an entire catalog of books, each earning nickels and providing new entry points for people to become fans.

Let Amazon do the work for you, and then find all the ways you can turn a handful of short stories into more revenue streams by collecting them later.

You can beat the machine.

So I have a patreon. And on the second of the month, I send out something to my people. Last month, what I was SUPPOSED to send out was the first three Yasmin of the Desert stories. Then this month I would follow up with 4&5, and in June they would get 6&7. 8 is done, but I needed time to catch up. Plus 1-7 is a novel-length collection that will come out one of these days.

All well and good.

Except that when I uploaded last month to bookfunnel, I grabbed the wrong file. The 7 file and not the 3 file.

Whoops.

Got an email from a confused patron a little while ago asking what he had screwed up. Wasn’t him. Grabbed the file down and opened it and “well, shit…”

Fortunately, I write a lot. So I sent everyone an apology email.

Looked around and flipped a coin in my head for what I would send out instead. Like I said, deep trunk to select things from.

The goal in 2019 was 20 novels. (Novel being single arc of story 40,000+ words). Did that. Most of them have not come out yet. Last December, was in Minneapolis visiting family and staying in a hotel. I write. That’s what I do. Started a story, but damnit this was NOT going to be the 21st novel, so I deliberately chopped it at 18,000 words. Nice solid novella as an origin story for a 1970s hero in a new genre we’re going to call Discopunk.

I had even done a cover for it, back when I was teaching myself such things under the tutelage of the Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) and it’s not half-bad.

So I hopped up from my leisure, grabbed the Mac, and got to work.

I love vellum. Import a word file. Import a front-matter doc that is already set up. Tweak a few things. Fill out the title information. Add the cover file. Tell it to format the document into epub, mobi, kobo, iBooks, and print.

And done. Pretty, too.

Then I uploaded it to Bookfunnel and got a new download link for my patrons.

Sent them a second apology email with the background of the story and the new download link, and looked up at the clock.

The first email had hit my box at 17:02. I hit send on on the replacement email at 17:38.

Raw docx file formatted, generated, uploaded, and delivered to my patrons in just under 45 minutes, and I wasn’t even pushing that hard.

That’s what I’m talking about, when I tell folks that the tools these days are THAT EASY. There is an investment in time, hardware, and prep, but once those are sunks costs, the rest is easy.

That’s how I can afford to do Boundary Shock Quarterly or Blaze Ward Presents. Or just put books up on my website shop for cheap so people can give me money instead of giving it to the 900 pound books gorilla.

So that was how I spent the last hour of my Sunday night. Might yet get around to watching a silly movie, but right now, I’m going back to goofing off.

How are you taking advantage of the tools of modern publishing?

🙂