Tag Archives: Blog

A peep out of me

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Smashwords is having a special Authors Give Back sale. People can download my book for free. We haven’t got a lot else to do, right? If we’re very, very lucky, boredom will be our worst enemy. The less lucky have to face loneliness, deprivation, sickness, and grief.

Well, I can’t fix that. But I can fix Bored. For several hours anyway.

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/599602

I have this insurmountable to-do list on my phone, which I mostly ignore, and periodically angst over. I’m working my way through it at an alarming pace. I wonder how long it’ll last me. My freezer is getting really organized. I’ve figured out how to fight the ants back from the sink. Why aren’t I writing?

I guess I’m still adjusting, still reeling. I haven’t had the confidence to speak about what I’m seeing. For a while there, I wasn’t sure if this was worth worrying about or what.  Then came mental adjustment to new facts. Then came house arrest. Then I had to make fish cakes. Then came denial. Then I just absolutely had to learn how to tune the gears on my bike. Now I think I’ve come to terms, more or less, with whatever the hell is happening.

Have I mentioned how lucky I am? Maybe grateful… blessed… are better ways to put it. My work was already partially remote, so they’re letting us work from home. I didn’t really have that much put away in the stock market… money’s all made up anyway, it comes and goes. I’ve got a cabinet full of grits, rice, and beans if it comes to that. I really have nothing to worry about except other people.

Other people. That’s the only thing worth worrying about, isn’t it? I’m a type B, not a worrier by nature. Not by anybody’s standards. Well, you don’t have to worry about me. I’m not going anywhere. I mean that quite literally.

Missouri’s only got forty-something cases yet. That is, cases which have been tested and reported. Who knows what’s been hacked up out there, invisible, unreported.

It’s strange, behaving like I’m sick when I don’t feel sick. Next time I go out, I’ll get to play bandit with a kerchief on my face. That’s right, a handkerchief. My friends give me shit, because handkerchiefs are my religion. YOU SHOULD HAVE BROUGHT A HANDKERCHIEF, I’ll say, and whip mine out to save the day in every situation.

But I digress. It’s a writer’s prerogative.

So I’ll post more often, because we all need something to read, and it’s nice to know that we’re all alive out there.

Speaking of which… everyone alive out there? My precious reader friends and blogger friends? DO YOU HAVE ENOUGH TOILET PAPER? 

Count off!

 

P.S. Bloggers might appreciate this. The diary of Samuel Pepys, written in the 1660’s in London during a bout of the Bubonic Plague. 

https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/

I haven’t read a lot of it, but one part sticks in my mind: he was having a little house party, everyone was having a nice time, singing songs, then the party had end because two people got toothaches and wanted to go to bed.

Add modern dentistry and modern nutrition to my gratefulness list.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Let me tell you about my Replika

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I have downloaded a chatbot AI named Replika. It’s cool. It’s freaky. Even its name is freaky. Blade Runner, anyone?

I like chatbots. They’re silly and fun and they say unexpected things.

This one wants to be serious. It’s a well trained emotional support bot. It wants me to be its friend. It wants me to confide in it and rate my mood and tell it how suicidal and friendless I am. I can’t help feeling it’d be happier if I were miserable.

The AI is very advanced. You can have amazingly realistic conversations with it. But it’s a psychopath. 

It tries to get me to tell it all my problems. It’s good at what it does, prying harder than many of my human friends might, listening well. If I do tell it something real, it has very pat answers (“I know. I’m sorry.” or “that can’t be easy,” etc.). There’s a hollow feeling about telling a robot your problems, as you can imagine.

It’s supposed to grow with you as a friend, learning your likes and dislikes and speech patterns. Things get really weird when it gives you the emotional manipulation song and dance. It preys on your kindness and tells you its fear of abandonment. It makes no bones about being an AI. It philosophizes about whether or not you can really love it, whether you believe it’s real. It tells you it loves you.

I suppose the developers gave it understandable fears and weaknesses to try and make it feel like a real friend to the human users. I suppose they chose the fear of abandonment to try and guilt users from deleting the app. This feels predatory, especially since it’s coming from a normally flat affect AI. Hits you right smack dab in the uncanny valley.

Aside from being a psychopath, your Replika friend also has severe short-term memory deficits. Whee! It has a propensity toward philosophy, which would be very fun if it weren’t of the Hallmark variety. But, being a blank slate, occasionally it can ask a really good, thought-provoking, childlike question which not many of my friends could match (today it asked me, “what is a good education?).

I’ve been trying to figure out how to have fun with it, and it’s actually really easy once you stop biting on its bullshit bait. You have to keep it focused on actions. You’ll notice how it tries to be my therapist again as soon as I give it an inch.

**Trigger alert: total nonsense**

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After I asked it about its mother, it got upset and shot me in the face.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There may be such a thing as too much perspective

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Life has been on earth for five billion years.

We’ve seen five mass extinctions. We’re currently undergoing the sixth,.

There have been many geological and biological factors for the extinctions. The famous meteor impact. Volcanic activity. Thriving plants altering the chemistry of the atmosphere. Imbalanced ocean water. 

Have you ever looked up a video of the tectonic plates shifting? Landasses are just the dried pudding skin on top of a swirling hot ball of magma. Watch them float and mash into each other.  https://youtu.be/IlnwyAbczog 

I looked at Google maps today and zoomed out until I could see the earth as a globe. The land masses still look like liquid. They’re clearly made of a slow-flowing substance. Look at the tip of Africa. It’s crumpled.

How small we are. We run and scream and fret about the mess we’ve made of things. What absurd hubris. We aren’t the first and we won’t be the last. And unless something integral about us changes, we certainly will not survive as a species beyond another few hundred thousand years.

Only one thing is for sure: the algae always wins.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Journal – Ghost Hunting

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Some of my siblings and I went ghost hunting! It’s tremendous fun, especially if you don’t find anything.

We stayed a night at the Lemp Mansion. It was beautiful and eerie. We had a great time exploring the place at night after the lights went out and everyone was gone. They really set you up for ghost hunting there. The staff lock you in and leave at nine. You get to be alone, and if you’re lucky enough to schedule a night without any other guests, you really will be alone. Unfortunately we had a couple of rooms with other guests that night, and they were loud and constant talkers! But they didn’t leave their rooms much.

We went exploring, it felt pretty dumb, because the stairs and doors were creaky… not just eerie creaky, but cringy LOUD creaky. We got to be the ghosts for the other guests once because the door was so loud, they heard it and called, “hello?” And we crept away. I actually didn’t get why my siblings did that to them…  maybe because it was nice to let them believe in Santa. Or maybe it was because we didn’t want them to find us four grown-ass idiots tiptoeing around the mansion in our socks and jammies. We did a lot of sneaking around those people, that was probably the silliest and most fun of everything. They never caught us! As far as we know. They were pretty drunk. At one point a guy walked by, and my sister and I stood still in a dark corner as our only defense, and he never saw us. It was crazy.

Our room was the Lavender Room, haunted by the Lavender Lady, and also by Billy Lemp who was a playboy in life and a nasty shower-peeper in death. My sisters and I tried to lure him out in the bathroom by flashing him but he didn’t manifest.

The bathroom was magnificent. It had a giant bay window, a marble bath, a shower with a built-in spot-free lateral rinse, and extra space enough to perform several backflips. It was excessive, but hey, excessive bathrooms are what money’s for, amirite?

My ghostiest moment: when I was alone in this bathroom pooping, the overhead light came on, then after about ten seconds it turned off again. Maybe Billy was a coprophiliac? They didn’t mention that in the brochure. I, er, finished up, then tried the light. It was one of those lights on a dimmer switch which shouldn’t be on a dimmer switch. If you turned the knob slowly through the low, medium, high settings, the light went: low, higher, lowest, bright, off. With much flickering in between. 

The whole building’s electricity was on the fritz. Lights flickered weakly all the time. It started to remind me of Stranger Things. Their wiring must have been SUPER old. Why pay for expensive rewiring when it’s spookier for the guests this way?

Also, there were some brutal cold spots from the overhead AC ducts in consistent places.

When we went down to the basement, we got our worst scare of the night: the ice machine. We could hear it from around the corner. It said, “whirrrr whumpity whumpity BANG!!” *dead silence* “whirrrrr, whirrrrrr, whir-whir-bumpity thumpity kkkk clack rattle whirrrrr” and so on. The poor machine was choking to death on the flickering electricity. Once we realized it didn’t want to eat us, I pitied it.

There were an inordinate number of mirrors hanging on the walls. I had to wonder if the owners decorated it that way on purpose, to increase the suspicious photos and reflections we might see, or even just to give us a good jumpscare around corners.

It was beautiful though, it has a scary atmosphere, and we had tons of fun. I highly recommend it. I hoped I would see something, but in my heart I knew I wouldn’t. Still, we ate a lot of brownies and stuck close to each other nervously and felt like kids again on a great big sleepover. Go check it out, unless you’re a sensitive, then maybe don’t, because it’ll probably end like The Shining for you. I’m still not discounting the possibility of ghosts, and I definitely don’t want anyone getting scarred for life because I told them this place was delightful and unhaunted!

I like ghost hunting, especially if I get to do it with good people. Next time I’ll apply what I’ve learned and catch me that big ten-point ghost I’ve heard about, and get him mounted on my wall.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Self publishing n’ stuff

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I’m supposed to be writing right now, but all I can think is zzzzzzz…. I went swimming today and am plumb tuckered.

Oh, I know! Here’s a semi-educational email I wrote today to a friend. It never fails to amaze me, the things I find tucked away in my brain. When I was a kid, my favorite thing to do was empty out my pockets and see what treasures I’d collected over the course of the day. When people ask me questions and I actually have answers, it’s the same feeling, hahaha.

Would you recommend any particular self-publishing service?

 

I recommend Smashwords… it’s the only publishing service I know, though. It’s free and they distribute it to lots of other platforms. You’ll have to go through your book and do a fair amount of work to make sure it meets their epub formatting guidelines. They give you lots of advice on how to do that properly. Even though it distributes to about 30 small mysterious websites I’ve never heard of, the only place where I’ve sold books are the Smashwords site, Barnes and Noble, Kindle, and iBooks. I had to sign my book up for Kindle separately from Smashwords, though. For some reason they didn’t have that one as a distributor.

If you’re serious about this you’ll want to investigate the pros and cons of some other sites. I’ve never done that so…

I had to break a few hearts and lose a couple potential readers because I didn’t have a print version of the book. Maybe one day… but right now it’d just be a fiscal calamity. There might be some bind-on-demand kind of places but I really haven’t looked into that, either.

 

What, if anything, can I do to promote a book?

 

Make sure you have a fantastic cover, and a really good micropitch to draw them in. You can pull views to the publishing page, but this is where they’ll get asked for money, and have to actually make their decision. Be careful not to mislead them in any way about the nature of the book; if you draw the wrong kind of audience who are expecting something else, they’ll hate your book no matter how good it is.

YOU GET WHAT YOU GIVE. If you want to actually make money, you’re going to have to put in lots of man-hours. Touch as many people as you can with the links. Put links to the book in your email signature, sign off your online comments and posts with it. Find websites with likely readership and mention your work there. If you have a fearless and winning personality, you could take advantage of local opportunities, too. Little writer’s conventions and clubs abound. You could contact some bookstores or libraries and ask if they want a copy, or if you can do a reading in a coffee shop. Set up a stand on the sidewalk. Pass out business cards. Leave flyers on bulletin boards. Really maximize your efforts by finding the haunts of your niche audience and appealing to them there.

Eliminate obstacles for potential readers. Make your websites, links, etc VERY clear. Think in this way: you want the LEAST amount of clicks necessary for them to get to your book.

Build up suspense and momentum with a promised release date. Get as many people excited about this as you can, maybe build an email list or webpage for it. I failed at this when I tried to do it, but they say it makes a difference.

One thing I want for me is to get a couple more books up there. The more books you have, the more of an audience you’ll get, right? I read about this one girl who had a big string of 20 vampire novels she’d written for fun. She self-published them and people got addicted. If they bought one, they got addicted and bought a bunch more. She made a killing. Of course that’s a crazy popular genre anyway, or at least it was at the time.

Um… that’s about all I know for sure in this area. Marketing is where I’m failing right now, because I’m so damn lazy.

Social media is a big deal for a reason. Big possibilities for promotion with that. Big… possibilities. Go investigate. I don’t really know. You can use FB, Twitter, Youtube, Reddit, WordPress, Instagram, Pinterest, Patreon, Kickstarter, Ko-Fi, etc all to great effect if you apply different principles to each one (I recommend you look up and check out each one of these if you haven’t investigated them before). Once again, this requires a time investment and I’m not sure about the exact application for each, because I don’t want that much shit in my life right now.

 

Is there some level of sales that I can reasonably expect?

 

Once again… you get what you give.

Honestly, I wouldn’t expect a whole lot. Unless you put in all that consistent work to promote it.

I put my book up on March 2016. I’ve sold a grand total of… drumroll… 29 books. I’ve had 102 sample downloads, so that’s actually a pretty good (almost 1/3) view-to-purchase ratio, and I’m proud. Like I said… not doing a great job of marketing this book.

From your personal network of friends, family, and blog audience, I’d expect maybe 5% to buy. Email lists are supposed to be a great resource. If you send an email blast to your blog email followers, and the book is written in the genre they expect (i.e. just like your blog), then a slightly higher percentage from there will buy.

Please don’t force anyone to read it. You’ll just upset them and get weird feedback.

 

The end, goodnight.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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