Answering Comments

As I said earlier this week, life has started to get real hectic again.  I know some folks have left some comments, and I swear I'm working on time to answer them.  I appreciate all comments, and I will respond to them at some point.  Seems like it should be easy and not time consuming, but my time is severely rationed right now, so it's more challenging than it seems.  Still, I'll get back into it at some point, so if you see a post you find interesting, please comment on it.

(BTW, if you're wondering why I'm writing this post instead of taking ten minutes to respond to a comment, it's honestly because I believe the blog is more important.  Sorry.)

Contest Commentary

I recently entered both Salvation Day and Wrongful Death into a writing contest, and although neither one won, I at least got some encouraging feedback(some I agreed with, and some I didn't).

For Salvation Day:
Salvation Day mixes science fiction and Christianity together to create a novel that provides some shocking moments and ultimately reestablishes a fairly traditional, and hopeful, Christian worldview. The novel starts by pulling the reader into the character’s emotional state right away, which is handled deftly, establishing recent events in Mike’s life and really making the reader feel the emotion instead of just know what his emotion is. However, after the strong opening, the set-up leading to the main story takes far too long. It’s not clear to readers why they should be interested in Mike’s work when they’re waiting for something to happen. Instead of going on about Mike at work and his relationships with the other workers, the author could have conveyed all this fairly quickly over a couple of pages that time was passing, and key events in their could have been included in passing as well—because those events are still not really the story. There are also some typos cropping up here and there from the beginning, which is off-putting for a new reader. The first time something out of the ordinary (in a sci-fi sense) happens is the demonic transformation of Reverend Walsh, but this was not as effective or engaging as it could have been. Instead of describing what’s going on and using evocative imagery, the transformation is mostly conveyed through Mike’s thoughts. And instead of simply including the thoughts, it would have been interesting to see Mike reacting to what he thinks he’s seeing; as it is, he only reacts to the normal conversation that’s going on at the same time. Still, the thought behind this novel should be moving for some readers, and once things got moving it was an interesting book to read. 

For Wrongful Death:
Wrongful Death presents with simple yet effective cover art design. The over-all production quality of the book is good—no real issues there. As to the plot and story appeal, the novel opens strong and really grips you from the get go. I enjoyed the story very much and really felt a connection to Christian. The author did a nice job with character development and interwoven plot points. Having a character suffer teenage trauma such as this will be something that your young readers can really absorb and learn from. I love the way you put your special twists and turns in the book—surprises for the reader don’t let up! This book is a solid thriller. Not totally unique, but a great effort and I enjoyed it very much. Your voice and writing style is perfectly suited for the genre. On the technical editing side, keep an eye out for overused punctuation (exclamation points), and incorrect use of dialogue tags. For instance, you can’t chuckle words. You can say words and then chuckle—but it is incorrect as a dialogue tag. Just a really strong entry. Thank you for sharing your world with us and best of luck with your writing endeavors. 

Obviously I wish both commentaries had been universally positive(or that one of them had won), but it's nice to know I'm not a complete hack.

More Hiatuses Possible

Folks, I'm trying very hard to stay on track with my blogging, but life is really growing hectic right now.  I'm in the middle of trying to retire from the military, I'm trying to get a decent civilian job, and I'm learning about a professional certification to try and beef up my resume.  Things are getting intense, so while I will do all I can to stay up, none of you are paying me, so I can't promise I won't miss a few from time to time.  I will be grateful to all who can be patient, and maybe life will return some time to me at some point.

Dropping Hints

I wrote earlier this week about my distaste for sequels simply for the sake of sequels, so this post may seem to the unintelligent to be a contradiction of that.  However, it's not.  Instead, it's about those who have planned out sequels or more story in advance, and the foresight necessary to do so.

I enjoy dropping subtle hints into my work, whether those hints are about future stories, or if they're about later in the current one.  In Salvation Day, I put in several small hints to give insight into the later parts of the book.  They were intended to be innocuous and, thus, only picked up on by the most discerning of readers.  Much like The Sixth Sense, they were intended to make the second reading more enjoyable as people started looking for the clues that were buried but perhaps not noticed the first time they read the story.  I did the same things in Akeldama and Wrongful Death(although not nearly as much in the latter).

Additionally, both Akeldama and Salvation Day are intended to have sequels.  I have not yet figured everything out, but there are major plot points that I've already thought through, and there are clues about those plot points in both works.  I'll be real curious to see if people figure them out as they read the next story, or if it'll make the second reading better.  Or, maybe the clues won't get noticed at all and will prove to be a big waste of time.  Whatever the case, such things were fun to include.

Where this post relates to my previous one is that while it was fun to write the clues into these previous works, they were intentionally planned.  I'm not glomming onto some obscure bit of throwaway dialogue that was never meant for a future work and shoving it into the story.  I've seen writers do that - my distaste for it in the Star Wars universe, especially in Thrawn, is no secret - and it makes my skin crawl every time.  It always feels like someone is trying to shove a square peg into a round hole, and it never feels right.

When you plan out a story, create those hints if you can.  Don't make them obvious, or else it's no fun...but make it fun for intelligent readers to find.  If you can do that, you'll gain a reputation for going beyond simple storytelling and into mind blowing tales that people want to read again and again.

Stop Preaching

Okay, this may be one of my more controversial posts in today's climate, but I cannot stay silent any longer.  I rarely stray into these kinds of divisive issues, but the harpy-like screeching I am seeing in the writing and publishing world is threatening to destroy good story-telling in favor of bland stories that do little but try to shout, "LOOK AT ME - I'M A GOOD PERSON!"

Stories today are straying from telling stories and into being vehicles to preach at people.  Characters are being shoved into stories where they don't necessarily fit, and villains are turning into caricatures, all for the sake of today's politically correct environment.  It seems like a lot of writers are either obsessed with cramming every bit of wokeness down our throats that they can, or they're so scared by the shrill, even if small, minority of folks that somehow feel like it's their duty to patrol the ranks of books to satisfy the latest laws of groupthink.

Now, before anyone crashes down on me - and some will no matter what I say - I'm not saying to go out and write stories to intentionally offend people.  I'm not even saying to exclude characters from your story if they fit.  However, that's a key point - the characters should fit.  If a character's sexuality, or ethnicity, or disability, is germane to the story, then by all means, please include it.  Depending on the role it plays in the story, it may even need to be played up.  That said, if it adds nothing to the story, why are you adding it?  I have never included any information about a character's personal identity that was unnecessary to the story, if for no other reason than to allow a multitude of diverse readers to picture it however they so desire.

I've come across multiple stories recently that felt the need to tell me all about a character's sexual awakening, or his or her struggle with Scoliosis, or how (insert race here) meant that he or she had to be looked at differently.  Again, if it's relevant to the story - like talking about Tom Robinson being black in the pre-civil rights south in To Kill A Mockingbird - then it should absolutely be part of the story, because the story is near incomprehensible and without context without it.  Unfortunately, so many writers seem to include long detail about such stuff not to enhance the story, but rather to shout into people's faces about how they're good people that include everybody.  Are we supposed to assume that otherwise they're bad people looking to exclude everybody?

(Speaking of To Kill A Mockingbird, given the scolds of today, does anyone think it could be published in modern times?  After all, although being a story about the blight of racism, it borders that around a false accusation of rape, which might make people today say we're trivializing such things by making that a story vehicle)

What's worse isn't the shoving in of certain things just to signal about how woke people are.  Instead, it's what I've come to call the "woke-scolds" who patrol books and stories to find any glimmer of not being sufficiently woke.  Such puritans aren't seeking so much to point out problematic work, but rather to scold folks that, in their opinion, the work is worthy of scolding simply because it didn't include enough of whatever righteous cause they were looking for, regardless of if it fit into the story.

Yes, perhaps the pitchforks have been lit, and perhaps angry mobs will soon descend upon my house for not being woke enough.  That I'm not looking to exclude anybody, but rather saying that it's the story instead of your virtue-signaling, that matters, will be lost on the mob.

All Stories Should End

I love reading a great story with characters I care about.  I want to know how they're doing, and how they overcame the obstacles in their way.  Reaching the end of such a story is as satisfying an experience as almost anything I can encounter.

That said, the story should eventually end...

Some folks like sequels simply for the sake of sequels.  I'm not one of them.  Stories that go on forever wear on me, for there never feels like there's true closure.  Hey, I get it - many people like to continue to see their favorite characters and their travails, and writers are always up for a sure thing.  And if there is actually more story to tell, that's a good thing too.  However, I read and watch so many stories that just go on and on and on that I find myself wondering if the characters are still on some kind of journey, or if they're just lost.

My review of Thrawn is a good example.  I enjoyed Timothy Zahn's Heir to the Empire trilogy.  And although I thought it was a stretch, the Hand of Thrawn books were fine too, but by the time Thrawn rolled around, pretty much everything had been said.  In fact, Thrawn turns the entire Star Wars universe upside down.  In using the convenience of the Yuzaan Vong invasion in that universe, and pretending that both Thrawn and the Emperor had foreseen the crisis, they end up making the Empire the good guys throughout the storyline, no matter how ruthless they may have had to be in order to "save" the galaxy from an extra-galactic threat.

This is one of the biggest problems with writing stories just to keep your characters around - you stray from what made them great and heroic in the first place.  Thrawn for example, was a great villain and worthy opponent for the heroes of the Star Wars universe.  Harry Potter's universe ended well at the end of book seven, so bringing back another book, even if not written by JK Rowling, was atrocious and upended convention again.  In short, it throws the established universe into chaos for a quick buck, thus ruining the reason we loved it in the first place.

Authors should move on to new ideas rather than being stuck groping around in old ones.  Always leave the audience wanting just a bit more.  If a story truly fits, fine.  However, staying in the same place out of comfort rather than new original ideas is laziness.

Tiny Victories

I've written before that I strongly feel that the ending of any story has to be justified by the story itself.  The brighter the end, the darker the journey needs to be.  However, recently, I've found myself wondering whether keeping everything so dark for so long is really in the best interest of the audience.

Yes, we want to get readers emotionally invested in our work, but sometimes getting too dark can drag down a piece of work into the doldrums of despair.  Take a pair of my favorite TV shows - The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones.  Both stories are not only well told, but they're infamous for keeping their characters in the shittiest of circumstances.  Any victory in The Walking Dead feels like cause for a celebration, even if that victory is something as simple as not getting beaten to death with a baseball bat.  Game of Thrones has gotten better, but people are always dying, and not just the baddies.

I've gotten to a point in my life where I'm kind of tired of sad and depressing.  And I'll lose my mind if I read a story that ends on a down note.  When I was younger, stories like The Good Son or Skull got my blood pumping, but I find myself nowadays cursing the writer and hoping he or she has to listen to Barney on repeat for all eternity.

Grit matters...but too much grit destroys.  Readers need occasional, tiny victories to know hope is still alive.  George Bailey needs to marry the girl, Parzival needs to put one over on Nolen Sorrento, and Luke Skywalker needs to escape from Darth Vader.  Dark moments should be used a little more sparingly, or at least in conjunction with lighter moments that let the reader know not everything is lost.

I don't know what it is - maybe it has just been  the crappiness of society in general the last ten years or so, but I find myself wanting more and more of a happy escape in my fiction.  If real life can't work out, maybe fantasy can.  Don't get me wrong - I'm not going to make everything sappy, but crapping on people simply for the sake of crapping on them isn't playing well any longer.  That crap should at least fertilize something.

Frustrations With Typing

Does anybody but me get mad at themselves when they're reviewing stuff and find an error?  Does anybody but me get mad at themselves because they feel themselves making an error while typing(as I just did in this previous sentence)?

Yes, I could crap out a post, or an article, or a book, not bothering to check it for correctness, but it'd be unprofessional and make me look like a schlemiel.  I had enough with the minor errors in the first edition of Akeldama.  Seeing in print something that I know I messed up on is maddening...yet I continue to get mad at myself when it happens in the moment.

Let's take this paragraph, for example.  I will type this paragrap without going back to correct it at all.  I can barely make it through a sentence without my fat fingers messing up ibn some way and making me see just how awful I can be when typing in a stream of consciousness.  Even now, I'm cringing at letting this paragraph go through without correctiong it.  And no, I didn't make these errors on purpose to illustrate a point - I'm just letting them stand so folks can see how easy it is to mesas up while typing since I don't yet have a thought to machine app.  I knowthere is talk to text, but it often uses the wrong word, and my frustration would double.

The absurd thing is how mad I get at myself when it happens.  I feel the wrong thing being typed when I mash down too many keys or hit the spacebar a touch too soon, and I'll sometimes pound the keys hard to back up and correct, as if the keys could feel my anger with them.  Then I read my post in advance of publishing it, and I get even more mad when I find stuff I messed up on and have to correct the original before my adoring public sees my scrawl.

Does anyone else experience this?  Please tell me that some of you do.  It won't feel good to be the only lunatic who goes through this...

A Masterpiece?

I recently read a blog post by Sarah Hoyt about how emotionally tied we get to our work, and it hit pretty close to home(or at least part of it).  I've released three books to date, and I got attached to each of them.  I shepherded them through the process of both writing and publishing, and I felt each was special in its own way.  I now wonder whether or not I've gotten too close.

I spoke two weeks ago about the cost it takes to bring a book out.  Yes, this is a little more than it has to be, but that's because I actually want a professional product and feel any schlub can simply upload one to Kindle or something.  Is that conceited?  Will that annoy fellow writers who crank out book after book very quickly?  Probably.  However, that's just the way I'm built.

But all of that may be keeping me from making any money at this.  Most writers starve, and that's because most of our work doesn't sell very well.  That may not be the public perception - tell someone you're a published author, and they instantly think you've got it made - but most of us have to do other things to pay the bills.  Still, some are able to make it, not because they produce anything special, but because they produce lots of nothing special.

I have yet to meet a writer who didn't think the book they spent more than a year writing wasn't a masterpiece.  After all, they put so much of their soul into it, everyone else should recognize its brilliance too, right?  Of course, the audience doesn't work that way, but that doesn't stop our pretension.

But it is the audience we should worry about(at least a little).  They buy our books, and most folks aren't swarming to stores to snap up masterpieces.  Yes, every once in a while you'll get a Harry Potter or Twilight moment, but those are so famous precisely because they're so rare.  The average reader may get through three books a year, and even avid readers will usually only go through about a dozen or so.  So perhaps volume is part of this.  After all, you can sell more if you have more to sell.

I'll have trouble adjusting to this.  Even Hoyt admits that she put out some stuff she thought was crap...but people bought it.  How would I feel cranking out similar crap.  My initial reaction is one of revulsion, as if I'd be selling my soul, so I can't say that'll be my route.  But if I want to focus on writing and putting out masterpieces, maybe I should occasionally poop out a book or 15 just to get the volume necessary for people to buy.  What do you think?

Just Write A Good Story

A disturbing trend I've come across more and more recently is writers asking others not to critique their stories unless the critique talks about how awesome they are.  People get so wrapped up emotionally in what they've written that it appears their world will fall apart if someone gives them something less than a stellar review.

Don't get me wrong - I love getting positive reviews.  Most writers I know do.  However, when I write a first draft of something, I want honest feedback on what may be wrong with it.  Why?  So I can fix it.  After that, maybe more people will want to buy it and I can make a living at this whole writing thing.  Besides, I can always ignore the critique if I think it lacks merit.

But what I'm finding is that so many hoity toity folks don't want any honest criticism.  I understand this when it comes to someone getting personal, but even that can be ignored(I don't care if someone says my writing is putrid little piles of shit they wouldn't feed to starving children, but not everyone laughs off such stuff).  Most criticism, however, isn't personal - it's professional.  We join critique groups to find out how our story played.  Why put it out there in a critique group if all you're looking for is affirmation?  Get affirmation after you've published and such stuff will help sell more books, but during the process, it's nearly useless.

What's more, I'm finding more people telling me to "remember" where they're from when thinking out my critique.  Let me put this straight - I don't give a shit where you are from, what your background is, or what you look like.  I care whether or not you've written a story I enjoy.  Your background has absolutely no bearing on it, and it serves only to silence criticism, as if someone who doesn't share the same story can only say nice things.  Sorry, but a story stands on its own, and your background doesn't play into it.  Your background may help you write a better story because it can give it more authenticity, but once it's written, it's the story that matters, not who you are.

Too many people tie their identity to their story, as if us not liking the story means we don't like them.  I get it - we put loads of ourselves and our efforts into writing something, and it hurts when others don't think it's as awesome as we think it is.  However, if I didn't want to help, I wouldn't read the damn thing to begin with.  Don't expect me to like a story by default just because you tie it into who you are.  If you're that sensitive, then I suggest that this whole writing thing may not be for you.

Easter Eggs And Generics

Hot on the heels of my review of Ready Player One, I wanted to touch briefly on the "easter egg" concept.  An easter egg, whether it be in a movie, book, or video game, is a tiny hidden thing that means little to the overall plot or story, but is there for geeks and nerds to find and ponder over.  Sometimes they have meaning to something in the future, but often they do not.

Ever since Adventure for the Atari 2600, folks have been hiding easter eggs in stuff.  ET is in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.  There's a naked woman in the cartoon The Rescuers.  R2D2 is in the hieroglyphics in Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark.  Pacman is in Tron.  None of these things have any bearing on the plot, so why are they there?

Part of me thinks it's simply out of ego.  We geeks like to think we're smarter than everyone else, so we plant secret stuff in our work and snicker about how much more clever than everybody else we are.  Of course, also being unable to keep our intelligence a secret, we then scream at everyone to find our clues so they can also know how smart we are.

Some easter eggs are there for the enjoyment of the audience.  Putting Sid as a grownup in Toy Story 3 was fun for those who figured it out.  It was also laugh out loud funny when they put Samuel L. Jackson's quote about "The path of the righteous man" on Nick Fury's tombstone in Captain America: Winter Soldier.  These things can be great fun, but you have to be ready and waiting to see them, and I usually want to enjoy the story the first time through.  I look for easter eggs on subsequent viewings.

Sometimes an easter egg can change things or make them a bit more creepy.  Scar's pelt(from The Lion King) can be seen in Hercules, making me wonder which big game hunter drug it there.  The Sultan in Aladdin has a stuffed toy of the Beast from Beauty and the Beast.  Did that mean it happened before or after the Beaty and the Beast movie(the implications could be profound).

While finding easter eggs can be fun, I prefer not to use useless devices in my own work.  Those that do, more power to them.  That's not to say I don't leave subtle clues.  In Salvation Day, I left several clues about what happened to the main character's daughter, and I also left behind several pieces about what you can expect in the sequel, but they're all plot related rather than geek related.

I promise I'm not trying to piss anyone off - I just wanted to point out that these things are often more exclusive than audiences may want.  Are they worth the effort?  Only the creator can determine that.

Review(s) of Ready Player One

Big shock - I'm a nerd.  I grew up playing Dungeons & Dragons, video games, and writing goofy things in large spiral notebooks.  As a child of the 80s, I enjoyed Space Invaders, the Rubik's Cube, and Family Ties.  So when I first heard about Ready Player One, I was psyched.  I hadn't gotten to read the book as of yet, but I knew I could see the movie...just as soon as it came on TV(my movie theater experience is ;limited mostly to cartoons for now).  I watched it and enjoyed the movie pretty well, and I posted such on Facebook.  That's when folks said that I just had to read the book...and that I should be grateful I watched the movie first.

Boy were they right.

(SPOILERS AHEAD - STOP NOW IF YOU DON'T WANT TO SEE THEM)
Let's start with the movie.  Overall, a good flick, but I found a few holes that needed to be addressed, starting with all of the OASIS characters being located in the same city.  The OASIS was online and could be accessed from virtually anywhere, so having main characters Parzival, Artemis, Aech, Sho, and Daito in the same city seemed...awfully convenient.  I think a big part of the adventure could have been bringing them together(a plot point I found out would be used in the novel).  I also wonder if anyone ever ate or slept in this world since they spent all of their time in the OASIS and didn't ever seem to leave.

The pop culture references were decent, but I saw a lot of stuff from the 90s(I was promised this was an 80s thing, not a 90s thing).  The Iron Giant, Spawn, and Halo were never an 80s thing.  I started wondering if I'd been lied to, or if the director, Steven Spielberg, wanted to change things up to get a younger audience involved(thus continuing the trend of Generation X being forgotten by everyone else).  Playing the video games at the end to win the final challenge was great, and I confess that even a dork like me never knew about the easter egg in Adventure(I always played to win, not just walk around poking at stuff).  However, the film's main villain, Nolen Sorrento, and his henchmen seemed to have no problem running around willy-nilly and shooting at people or blowing them up in real life.  The police only showed up at the end, so I wonder whether law and order drew them, or if it was that there was suddenly a new richest man in the world they could try to get money from.

Finally, having one of the creators of the OASIS just standing around to dole out information and other goodies, like extra lives, seemed like an awful waste of time.  Did Ogden Morrow just wait in the historical records section for people to randomly show up and ask him stuff?  Might've made sense if there were thousands of players still using the archives, but by the time Parzival got the information he needed, no one was going into the archives any more.  Morrow was also an incredibly wealthy man, so I think he might've had better things to do than hope that someone might show up and might need him one day.

All in all, a good movie, and the plot points I'm hitting are really nit-picky.  Now...about the book...

All I can say is that I'm very glad I didn't read the novel prior to watching the movie, for I'd have come out pissed.  The movie incorporated maybe 20% of the book.  Maybe.  The background was the same, but every challenge and nearly every character was different.  As in the movie, you had to get three keys, but each key in the book unlocked a challenge to be completed, and the challenge wasn't near the place you got the key(something the movie ignored).  Further, getting the key required you to play a series of video games, something not even alluded to in the movie until the final key.  The ways/places you got the key were also totally different(in the movie, you got the first key by winning an unwinnable race; in the book, you got the first key by exploring a D&D module called The Tomb of Horrors.)

The characters were also dispersed across the world(as they should've been), but one of the main ones, Daito, is killed in the "real world," which would've totally changed the dynamic of the game in the movie.  Parzival doesn't live in the same city(which is really important in the movie vice the book), and Ogden Morrow, the co-creator of the OASIS, isn't hanging around the archives to give away free lives(to get an extra life, you had play a perfect game of Pacman).  Yes, maybe playing video games wouldn't have translated as well to the big screen, but they could've tried keeping it a lot more like the book if they wanted a better movie.  It reminded me a great deal of how World War Z had only the title in common with the novel.  Okay, so it wasn't quite that bad, but it wasn't much like the novel either.

My only gripe was that the author's politics kept creeping in to the book.  Okay, okay, I get it - the writer thinks we're destroying the environment and big corporations are taking over the planet, but did we have to get preached at?  Some of that was necessary for the setting, but throwing in the atheism and cartoonish big company greed part was just a bit over the top.  I enjoyed the story, and most of this was in the background, but it came out often enough in the narrative to make me cringe.

Both of these - movie and book, were great, and I haven't enjoyed reading a fun novel like that in a long time, but they were definitely not related as much as they should've been.  Watch the movie first, if you can, or accept that the novel and movie have about as much in common as John McEnroe and Serena Williams(both play tennis and were champions, but that's about it).  It may not sound like it since I give some critiques, but I recommend these works to all geeks(and anyone else who just likes adventure).

Writing While Polarized

I've been pretty vocal about keeping your personal politics out of your writing.  After all, why alienate nearly half of your potential audience before they even pick up your work?  I've worked hard to not allude too much to my own political viewpoint, and I've written different missives from various political and religious viewpoints just to see if I could pull it off.  However, I'll bet that even now someone is searching through both those posts and this paragraph to see if he or she can determine my political leanings and see if those leanings line up with the way that person thinks they should.

You see, it's not enough nowadays to just keep differing political opinions out of our work - we now have to hold the "right" views in our personal lives and our personal dealings if we want to maintain peace.  I recently lost a fellow writer/friend who I'd been talking to for over ten years because I didn't toe the line that person thought I should.  Now, I didn't really know this other person outside of his work, but we both seemed to have similar personality quirks, and I enjoyed his tomes.  In the current climate, though, he'd had enough with my not agreeing with him on every point.  He claimed it wasn't because of my view, but that I'd gotten personal.  What I did was chime in on a post he'd written that he admitted he wrote with me in mind.  Both of us being bullheaded, I responded to him the way I usually do to those who show they want to lecture rather than engage in dialogue - I gave it right back to him in the same way, only I upped the dial(I'm not one to tolerate lecturing or condescension without charging right back).  He then said he had to cut me off and that he'd been wanting to do it for more than two years.  This person is on the opposite end of every political and religious viewpoint I hold, but we got along due to our both being writers and dealing with some of the same issues in life.  I thought we could overcome our political differences(which we'd done multiple times previously), but I think the polarization has simply gotten too extreme.  My (former) friend appears to think one cannot be a good or moral person if one takes the other point of view, which is asinine.  Yes, there are some things that indicate such - being an out-and-out racist, calling for genocide, liking Justin Beiber - but most of our differences aren't on that scale, and equating normal political thought in America with Hitler, Stalin, Cthulu, or Satan shows a narrow mind and no understanding of either history or scale.  Is it really asking too much that we keep our disagreements to the issues and not delve into name calling because we have to cast a differing point of view as OMG THE MOST EVIL THING EVERRRRRRRRRR?

I've run across some publishing houses and others in the writing/publishing industry who won't even give the time of day to someone who holds a different point of view.  I personally know someone who was previously published and went into a publishing house but got kicked out because he said he didn't want to talk about politics.  He didn't even take a different viewpoint, but when the agent said he wanted to discuss why (insert generic politician here) was the most evil thing to walk the face of the Earth, this person simply said, "I'm here to talk about my work, not politics," my buddy got the old heave-ho.  So now we can't even maintain peace through silence?

This is why Schism will be such a timely book.  The more and more I see how we've tribalized ourselves, the more I'm convinced we're headed down the road of true civil strife, if not civil war.  I dislike being such a Debby Downer, and I desperately hope I'm wrong, but I see the seething hatred coming from everywhere and I don't know if we can avoid it.  We should be able to hold wildly divergent views and still be able to be friends at the end of the day.  But as too many these days demonstrate, including my former friend, that just doesn't seem possible.

The Schedule Ahead

Now that I'm back to writing, some will wonder what my schedule for publication is like.  I have two novels - Homecoming and Schism - that are just about ready to go.  I need to read through Homecoming one more time, and I need to add a little more heft to Schism(it's written in four acts, but I think the fourth act needs to be split in two), so it's not their completeness that's the issue - it's the cost.

I takes about $900 to bring a book out.  Between cover art, formatting, and editing, it takes nearly $1000 to properly bring a book to market, and my funds are running low at the moment.  I have enough to bring out one, but not two.  Don't get me wrong - I'll definitely publish both at some point, but I can't afford to do both in the next year or so.  Therefore, I have to choose.

And that's the rub, isn't it?  Which one would be the best to bring out?  Which one could get the most heat?  Both are different types of books than I've published before.  Homecoming is a science fiction novel written in a journal format, and Schism is a four(soon to be five) act story written both in narrative and internet stream of consciousness format.  While the themes are big, ie - revolving around massive and earth shaking consequences, neither delves into the spirit world or talks about God very much.

Looking at the current landscape, I think the choice is obvious - Schism.  My next post is going to be about how divided we are, not just as a nation, but also as a people, and I think Schism will bring the most heat to the market.  I'm setting it's release date for April 5, 2020, right in the heart of the election season(during primaries but before conventions).  I think it captures the seething hatred our society currently feels towards anyone who doesn't share our personal political beliefs or aligns with another tribe(tribe in this case being an opposing political party or world outlook).  Is it cynical of me to try and ride the wave of polarization our nation is currently suffering?  Probably, but I'm a businessman in the end, and the market will be prepped for just such a book since there's something in it for everyone on all sides to enjoy/feel righteous about.  Additionally, it'll give me a little more time to make sure I have sufficient funds to publish without it wrecking my account.  Afterwards, we'll see what happens on the publishing front.

I also plan to start writing novels again.  I started with a half-hearted attempt at the sequel to Akeldama, but the first draft came out poorly(actually, the plot spun wildly out of control), so I need to wait a bit on that one.  Plus, as indicated, my heart just wasn't in it.  However, my heart is into the Salvation Day sequel, and I want to at least write the first chapter.  There's also a song I hear every now and then on the radio that constantly inspires me, so I better write it before it bursts out of my chest.

As to my other books, there are three more novels I've completed, but all three need extensive re-writes.  I used to wonder why authors didn't let us see their first drafts - after all, they produced such great work that I enjoyed reading - but now I know.  Had I seen those early drafts, I might not have read the final draft, because first drafts usually stink.  So I'll re-write those three other novels before they come close to seeing the light of day.  Maybe by then enough of you will have bought so many books of mine that I'll have the funds to publish without worrying about choosing between spaghetti and dog food.