Category Archives: Writing

The Independent Writer’s Dilemma

Business, Social Networking, Writing, , , , , , ,

There’s a great article on Nathan Bransford’s site about e-book publishing. For clarification, I received this article following a link from an article by Elijah Rising’s blog (I give credit where credit is due). But what I wanted to talk about is something this article brought up as an issue for me, and it’s one that I think more writers are probably thinking about themselves, and an issue that really needs some kind of attention as we move forward.

The issue is simple. How does a writer who is unknown, independent, and did I mention unknown?, get any attention in the first place so that an e-book isn’t just seen as yet another announcement in the ether that disappears like a Twitter post on, oh, say my Twitter feed with its awesome 38 followers (that tend to be ready to drop me at a moment’s notice if I post a topic that displeases them in any way…I’m just saying)? As one of those writers myself, who has been trying to build an audience for himself for about as long as he’s been writing, I am constantly left wondering if somehow I missed the boat, and that a writing career just isn’t possible.

How does the independent writer create an audience, or at least set up marketing so that it’s productive and leads to sales (and, obviously, readers)? It seems like there’s a variable missing in the game, and that so many of us are trying to figure out what it is while so many others are easily making it through life without any effort, like a teenage girl who makes a Youtube video about a horrible song that ends up getting endless play because of how horrible it is (and then a record deal). I mean, what planet are we living on when this sort of thing happens in such Bizarro style?

It’s almost as if you need to be famous already in order to make it as a writer, and that basically writing isn’t the thing people are looking for in the things they read. I know it sounds ridiculous, but what am I missing here? When Snooki can write (if you call it that) a novel and it becomes somewhat of a bestseller, and a dedicated writer can’t sell more than two copies of a novel in a month, I’m left wondering what’s wrong. It would be one thing if I knew my writing sucked, but it doesn’t, and fortunately I’m way past the self-incriminating stage of my writing career. But it is so easy to be sniped at by other people when someone with very little writing talent gains a writing career when someone else can spend his or her entire life trying to do the same thing, and the only difference is I didn’t first get famous by having sex in a hot tub with social misfits first.

But I’m not making this post to complain about that. Such things are always going to happen, and we know it. What I’m trying to do is work out, in my writing, or my head, what it takes for the average, yet decent, writer to make it as a writer in today’s atmospheric dynamic. Part of me still clings onto the belief that a traditional publishing company is the way to go, but when that doesn’t seem to be working out, you have to keep trying something or you give up. And I’m not ready to give up.

Yet.

Updating the Ole’ Website

Business, Social Networking, Writing, , , , , , , ,

I’ve been meaning to do it for quite some time. I’ve had my main website look like it was designed by three year olds for the longest time now. The reason was my newer Internet provider (Site5.com) provided a free tool for building a site, and when I left my old provider, I was just lazy that day and went with the standard stuff. Needless to say, it was a massively crappy looking site, and I just kind of lived with it, figuring no one cared anyway. I do most of my work on the blog, so I figured no one would ever notice it, but as I am a professional writer, I kept looking at that really bad site and thinking, man people must think I have no html skills whatsoever.

So, this weekend, I sat down and redesigned the site to be a lot cleaner and got rid of the crappy “extras” that came from the Site 5 builder software. Honestly, none of it was useful, and my point was just making a site that reveals I’m a writer, what I’ve written and how you can get ahold of my log. That’s really all I wanted, and now, that’s all I have.

The site, in case you haven’t figured it out, is littlesarbonn.com, and it’s active now. I’ll probably spiffy it up to be more eye-attractive, but I’ve always been a minimalist when it comes to web design, so I don’t imagine I’ll be doing too much more to it, other than adding needed functionality as time permits.

So there.

Twitter: The Technology Everyone Uses Yet So Many People Hate

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Recently, I’ve gotten into the whole Twitter thing. Before that, I was strictly a blog guy who swore he would never really get into Twitter. But a few years back, I opened up a Twitter account because I’ve always been one of those “well, everyone else is doing it, so I should, too” kind of guys. Like most people who join Twitter, I followed a few people, waited for the throngs to follow me, realized no one was going to follow me and then just stopped using it. I figured, like so many other people do, that it obviously doesn’t work because it wasn’t working for me.

Yet, since then, a few nations, including Egypt, collapsed because of the use of Twitter. No matter how I tried to ignore the story, it was HUGE, and the fact that this strange technology was used to bring down a powerful dictator really was hard to pretend it wasn’t this massively large elephant in the corner, practically taking up the whole room. So, recently, I decided I would go back into the technology to see if maybe I might have been missing something.

What I have discovered is that there’s a lot of very interesting information that gets shared on Twitter, but you have to be patient to realize it. If you go into the game with the thought that you’re going to get instant satisfaction or quick results, you don’t understand Twitter. And I didn’t understand it. Now that I’ve started to follow a bunch of people, I’m starting to realize that it’s a pretty interesting way to view the world. Therefore, I’ve decided to give some advice to those of you who may be thinking about getting into it yourself.

1. Follow people you are really interested in knowing more about. This is really important because one of the mistakes I was making was trying to “sell” me and then getting people to start following me. It rarely happens. It actually looks desperate, and who wants to follow someone who is the equivalent of the loser in a bar trying to pick up on anything that walks in? No one does. However, what I did start to discover is that because I’m a writer, and I’m interested in all things writing, I’m going to find a lot of interesting people to follow who actually might have useful information. You also quickly discover who is just there to use it as a marketing tool and who is there to use it as a communication vehicle. Some writing Twitterers I followed, like Publisher’s Weekly, have interesting information they share with their followers. Others, which I won’t name cause this isn’t really a “diss” kind of article, weren’t all that helpful and turned out to be really annoying more than anything else. The hardest thing I found myself having to do was unfollow someone, but sometimes, you need to just because the amount of spam that someone clutters up your channel with can be overwhelming, especially when it’s not helpful.

2. Some people are on Twitter because their egos need to be checked. A lot of celebrity Twitterers are like that, and it’s unfortunate. But it also tells you a little more about them and lets you realize that you’re probably better off avoiding them. One person I started following in the beginning was Felicia Day, who is the creator of the series The Guild. She doesn’t Twit that often, but when she does, it’s usually interesting and worth following. About half of what she has to say is interesting. Mindy Kaling, however, who is the girl who plays the Indian girl on The Office, I thought would be interesting and funny to follow. Personally, she’s not. I found her attempts at humor to be really attempts to try too hard to be cool, and pretty soon I’m probably going to unfollow her. An interesting celebrity I’ve been following has been Wil Wheaton, who is the man who played Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation. I haven’t come to a decision on him so far, as I’m suspecting he’s still looking for validation, as I noticed when some of the senior members of the Star Trek franchise were twittering and left him out, and he actually made a bit of an appeal last night, practically begging for attention. He’s an interesting case because he tends to float between a Felicia Day (interesting to follow) and Mindy Kaling (not worth the time). So the jury’s still out on him. However, it should be pointed out that if you’re hoping to be followed by a celebrity, or even have one actually pay attention to anything you write in response, it rarely happens. I used some of my best funny material in responses to Felicia Day, and I was pretty much ignored, which is probably no different than it would have been had I met her in public. Unfortunately, the lowly among us remain lowly.

3. If your goal is lots of marketing potential, then yes Twitter is a great tool to use, but you’re going to have to put in a lot of work and a lot of time before it ever pays off. If you spam your messages into the channel, people will dump you in a heartbeat, which means you have to use the technology to actually communicate. And like most avenues of communication, if you’re only projecting and not listening, people stop listening to you. Granted, the celebrities still get attention because they’re celebrities, but the average person, like me, is only really going to get attention as long as he has something interesting to say. So if you’re just there to build followers, you’re going to have a hard time unless you can provide something interesting to say. I started off with very few followers, and slowly, I’m building a bit of a following, but I’m not fooling myself into believing I’ve somehow tapped into the Duane-amaniacs. Therefore, I have to make sure that what I have to say is as interesting to me as it is to them, kind of like regular writing is. People avoid spam and really want something interesting to read. Otherwise, why follow you?

4. The social implications of Twitter are huge and have already proven themselves to be excellent. Like Egypt discovered, Twitter gives the average person a voice he or she might never have had before. When people were looking for information about Egypt and the revolution, well, that was an audience just waiting to hear what had to be said. Twitter was perfect for that. What happens to that Twitter audience now is probably even more interesting, but I doubt too many people will study that as researchers always look for that pivotal event, not the continued ramifications of a pivotal event that has run through its play in the media.

5. The complainers and the critics. There was an interesting article today on CNN’s site about the 5 ways Twitter changed how we communicate. What was even more interesting were the comments from the readers. Most of them were from what I like to call the old grandfather who lives in the house that no kid likes to go near, constantly yelling, “damn kids, get off my lawn!” Rather than read the article and be interested in the new technology, the haters showed up and posted responses like Shawn777: “Twitter? I don’t even use that crap” and Guest119 ‘s “200 years from now, provided humanity doesn’t blow itself up with nukes, Twitter will not even be a footnote in tech history.” My personal spin on this is that the majority of the complainers are people who tried it out on a weekend, didn’t get a million followers and then figured it was a dead technology.

6. What is the future of Twitter? Who knows? Certainly not me. I’m pretty late getting on the bandwagon as it is anyway. I do know that somewhere down the line another technology will replace it and be the next “in” thing. I’ll probably be late for that one, too. But right now, Twitter is serving as an interesting way to communicate, and as a writer and a communications professor, it’s hard for me to continue to ignore it.

For the record, if interested, follow me on twitter at DuaneGundrum.

Stop me before I buy more books! And other complaints when it comes to running a blog.

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For some reason, I’m a glutton for books. I buy them even when I don’t need them. Case in point: Today. I was at Barnes & Noble just wandering around, minding my own business, when out of the blue BAM! Another book came at me from behind and forced me to buy it. I didn’t even get to the cash register before another book, hiding behind the greeting cards and magazines jumped out WHOOSH! and there I was at the counter with two books I didn’t need. But no matter how hard I tried to get them out of my hands, they wouldn’t leave, and I ended up having to shell out another forty some bucks to the evil cash register lady for the purchase of said books.

I had actually gone into B&N looking for a specific book on Twitter information. I recently realized I had this Twitter account that I never really did anything with, so I decided I would see about optimizing Twitter to see if it might actually benefit my blog. My blog has been one of those underperforming vehicles that has been driving me nuts for some time. I write posts constantly, and I seem to have a massive amount of phantom traffic, but I’ve never really been able to do anything with my blog to make it worthwhile to me. I’m not talking about making money, like others try to do with their blogs. I’m more interested in just getting people to read my stuff, and I’m constantly struggling to do so.

Some months back, I joined Open Salon and started blogging there, and what I discovered was that if I didn’t spam the crap out of people, I really didn’t get any real traffic to my blog. And that bothered me. I decided to stop emailing people every time I wrote a post because I started to feel that it was bothering people rather than letting them know that I had more posts for them to read. I know that I have started to get annoyed at the amount of emails I get from people who post every day (and then email me every day), so I decided I didn’t want to be one of those kinds of bloggers. Unfortunately, the alternative is even worse. My blog is practically invisible as a result.

It’s partly frustrating because it kind of falls into the same paradigm problem I have with my writing career. I know I’m good at writing, but I can’t get a career jumpstarted no matter what I do. So I end up writing for myself or for the wind (or whatever other dorky metaphor fits the situation). My main blog site has been active for years, and it’s almost like I started it yesterday, judging from the amount of communication that comes across it. It’s a lot like my life these days. I get the idea no one even knows I’m alive, even though I’m still kicking and screaming. Just screaming in silence with the volume turned way down so as not to wake up the neighbors.

If I Had the Job I Really Wanted

Books, Business, Economics, Memoirs, Writing, , , , , , , , , , , ,

I’ve been giving this a lot of thought lately. Not sure why, but it just keeps coming up in my mind. I wonder what it would take to finally get the job I really want, rather than the job I actually have.

I don’t mean I don’t like my current job. It’s okay. It’s just not really all that exciting. Nor is it really that hard. It’s not even all that interesting. I’m a glorified editor who sometimes creates stuff that’s not really very creative. It requires working for the health care industry for a hospital system, and most of the stuff I do is really designed around rudimentary stuff like registration, insurance and other boring stuff that would cause most people to scream if they had to deal with on a day to day basis. Every now and then I get to contribute on some education for a surgical procedure, but it’s not like anything I contribute really helps the procedure in any way. I just make sure that people can understand it, and that no one in the chain of command (or higher up outside of the chain of command) thinks it was designed by Neanderthals.

But no, I think I’ve figured out the job I’d rather have. I just don’t think I’ll ever be able to get it. It’s not because the job isn’t something I can’t do. I’m highly qualified for it, and if I was able to find an opening, I’d probably be one of their top choices. But I don’t live anywhere near the place where this type of job is accessible, and in order to move to such a place, I’d probably have to be jobless for some time before I actually found something, and that’s never a good situation to be in.

I’m not even talking about a really, highly technical job like law or medicine either. I’m talking about something I do all of the time. As I’m a writer, I realize the job that’s perfect for me. I should be a copy editor, or an editor for a large book company.

I know these jobs are out there, and I know a lot of strong writers got their start in the field by making connections with these types of jobs. I just don’t live anywhere near where such a job might be possible.

This often gets me thinking that I’m living in the wrong place. I even moved back to the wrong place when I came back from South Korea. The San Francisco Bay Area just wasn’t the place for me, even though you’d think those jobs would be available there. I really think I should be living in New York City. I just don’t know how to make that kind of move, as I’m now kind of stuck in West Michigan right now. There’s not a lot of upward mobility when you hit your 40s. You’re kind of stuck with whatever job you can get, and often you have to stick it out, even if it’s not the best match for you.

If there was some way to obtain a job like this from afar (BEFORE moving), that might be the greatest thing ever, but I’ve never been all that successful with trying to hook up a job long distance (even though I did get the current one that way). I just really think that working for a big publishing company as an editor is the one thing I could probably do well. I sure don’t see myself getting a job with the government or anything all that exciting these days.

Oh well.

Government, Intelligence and Why the Future May Not Be So Great

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Years ago, I was a counterintelligence agent working for the US Army. It was an interesting career and one I obviously can’t talk too much about, but at one point it ended, I became a civilian and then went on with my life. Shortly after getting out of the service, I applied to the Central Intelligence Agency, was accepted and the day before I was to fly to Washington, D.C. for the final signing, I received a form that I had to fill out before I would be flying out. The paperwork informed me from that point on that EVERYTHING I ever wrote in the future would be subject to having to be cleared by the CIA before it could be published.

Being a writer, I stared at that form and realized there was no way in hell I could sign it. I was writing espionage fiction at that period in my life, and all I could think was that somewhere some paper pusher was going to start deciding what I could and couldn’t write in my novels, mainly because I would have signed a paper allowing someone to do just that. All sorts of fantastical scenarios played in my head to the point that I talked myself out of joining the CIA, turned down the flight and for the next few weeks fielded calls from the recruiting agent who kept explaining I was overreacting. But it was a no deal for me, and that was the end of that chapter in my life.

Fast forward a few decades, and I was actually applying for a position as an agent who conducted background investigations, requiring the same clearance that I had before. As the background investigation was conducted on me, it suddenly stalled when a discovery was made: Some 20 years or so ago, I turned a car back into the dealer because I couldn’t afford to make payments on it. Because I was flat broke back then (and bordering on homeless), I cut ties with that loan agency and they with me. The agent who negotiated taking back the car indicated that that would be the end of it, and we’d part ways amicably. Turns out he lied as the car company charged off the debt and then sold my debt to some credit collector who continued to harass me for many years since that mistake. Welll, 20 years later, during a background investigation, suddenly I was a questionable applicant as I obviously couldn’t be trusted to keep secrets for the government because I had a bad credit item in my past. I was turned down for the clearance.

So, since then, I’ve realized that I’ll probably never be able to work for the government again. I was looking into working for the State Department at one point because my academic research actually yielded an innovative peace process that had been untried before. However, because of this whole clearance thing, I realized that I could never work for the State Department either. To be an administrative assistance in the State Department, you have to be able to qualify for one of the highest clearances. So, that means that in the future, even though I may have discovered a peace process that might yield future success for the world, and especially our country, it won’t go anywhere because the guy who came up with it obviously can’t be trusted.

This got me to thinking that our future is kind of screwed in more ways than one, and not just because we’ll never be able to achieve peace through my academic research but because we are still at the trail end of a major recession, which means a lot of people now have really bad credit. Therefore, when things start to improve, we have a whole new crop of people who can never get security clearances because they have bad credit in their past.

Our credit process has now turned our nation into one that has fewer and fewer qualified people able to serve it, which means that as our choices are limited by those who can maintain a clearance, we lose a lot of intelligent people who may have ran into a problem somewhere in their past. Talk about cutting off the great accomplishments of so many potential people who might want to still serve our nation but can’t mainly because they’re not wanted anymore because of some past incident that was probably not planned or desired.

I remember receiving letters from the clearance agency people indicating that I had to somehow “explain” my credit problem, and all I could think at the time was: “There was this time in my life when I had no money, no job and no hope of ever changing that. What more would you like to know?” Figuring that wouldn’t be good enough for someone in a government job who has probably never experienced that situation, I threw away the letter and figured the government just didn’t want or need me anymore.

I imagine that’s going to be happening a lot in the near future.

Those Rare Movies Where Great Writing Appears Almost from Nowhere

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I’ve been kind of consumed by something else lately. I’ve been trying to write Java programming for a personal project of mine. But usually when I get consumed by something like that, every now and then something else manages to hit me out of left field, and I’m left astonished because I never saw it coming. This time around it was a movie I watched on Blue Ray the other day, a movie called Sideways.

I heard the movie was pretty good, so I had bought it on Blue Ray back when Best Buy had it on sale. Of course, buying a movie and then finally seeing it are two different things as my time is usually very limited. But on the weekend, I decided to take a few hours and actually watch the movie I had bought weeks ago.

I’m usually not that taken in by movies, as I’ve become a very cynical critic of most movies I see these days. Don’t get me started on the whole remake phenomena that seems to be going on these days. But as I watched Sideways, I realized I was seeing something that was rare. It was not only a very good movie with excellent acting from everyone in it, but the writing was superb. From a writing standpoint, there’s a moment when you’re watching superb writing that you start to realize it, and for me it was pretty deep into the movie because I hadn’t even realized it was affecting me so. But at one point, I even felt the scene hitting me because the writing was so perfect and delivered so well by Paul Giamatti that I was floored by what I was seeing.

The scene was simple, between Giamatti and Virginia Madsen, who were having an intimate conversation about wine. At one point, she asks him why he loves Pinot, and it starts off as such a simple response before it turns into a metaphor for the character Miles, who Giamatti plays. He talks about how the Pinot is a red wine grape that struggles for survival, and unlike the Merlot, he appreciates everything that grape goes through as it can only survive in specific climates and areas but manages to succeed and produce a wonderful tasting wine as a result of its survival. The lines that Giamatti delivers in this scene were so powerful and so poignant that I found myself amazed that this practically appeared from nowhere yet seemed so perfect for the moment that served as its introduction.

When the movie was finished, it made me wish that so many other movies would even attempt a smidgen of the brilliance that existed within this script, but then I realized that so many other movies would shove themselves out of Hollywood’s doors and we’d have to wait for something as wonderful as the writing of that movie again.

Memoir Books Are Being Slowly Replaced by Lazy Writers

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I was in the bookstore the other day looking over the selections of books when I came across a really interesting book of which I had heard nothing so far. But it looked intriguing. It was called Moby-Duck, and as you can see from the picture with this article, it is about a man who goes on a quest to discover what happened to 28,800 bath toys that were lost at sea.

So, why am I talking about this book? Well, think about the story involved in this book. The author, Donovan Hohn, actually put forth a lot of work to find out what happened to these rubber duckies and bath toys after the disappeared. In essence, he went on an epic quest, like the infamous Moby Dick to find what happened to these items. In other words, he went through a hell of a lot of work to get the story that he later transposed to paper so that the rest of us could experience his adventure.

My point is that so few people who write memoirs these days actually go through this amount of work in their adventures before sitting down and writing their “memoirs”. Instead, they suffer one bad relationship, have a bad drinking problem, or do something singularly simple and then try to convince the rest of us that it was actually an epic journey to get from one place to the other. I guess you could say I’m getting a little sick of these kinds of stories that really have no great master journey to them, no odyssey, yet are treated as if they are the epic adventures of a lifetime.

We need more writers out there who are willing to go through a little bit of work to actually come back with the story they need to tell. Instead, we get lazy writers that try to profit off of their innane adventures. And we keep buying this crap because none of us are willing to demand more from the writings that we read.

I felt this way some time ago when I was writing one of my earlier science fiction novels, Thompson’s Bounty, which was about a Coast Guard cutter that gets sent back into the 17th century. When I first started writing the novel, I actually tried to just crank it out without really knowing much about my subject, other than having watched a few old movies about pirates. Then it dawned on me that I wasn’t ready to write the novel. So I contacted the Coast Guard and requested some in person information, which led to going out with a cutter crew for several days over several weekends. It also led to a bunch of long conversations and tours on a Coast Guard base where very knowledgeable people gave me first hand information about the subject I was writing. In the end, I wound up with a book that told the story I wanted to tell instead of one that was peripheral and out of context.

Recently, I’ve been working on a novel that I originally wrote decades ago that takes place in Eastern Europe during the Cold War. Originally, I kind of winged it through the story, but after doing my thesis work on the August Coup in the Soviet Union, I finally had the premise, place and event that really made up the background of the novel I wrote years before. So, I’ve been sitting down and tackling that book from the start, realizing that I now know a lot more information than I first did when I wrote that book back then.

That’s sort of the thing I’m talking about with the kind of reading I’m coming across these days. So much of it can be so much better than it is if authors would take the time to actually do the research that would make their books that much better. I remember a great scene from Billy Crystal’s Throw Mama From the Train when a woman in his creative writing class is describing a submarine story she wrote, and he comments that maybe she should actually know the name of the device she’s describing if she wants to be taken seriously in a story that involves submarines. I take his advice a bit further and say that maybe some time should be given to exploring the lifestyles and events that lead people to the moments that occur in novels so that the reader believes the author is the right person to be writing the story.

We seem to have a lot lazier writers these days with a lot of the stories and memoirs I read, but that doesn’t mean we have to settle for that. We can demand more substance, research and work. We just generally don’t. And we’re the ones who suffer as a result.

The Act of Writing a Screenplay

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I’ve been thinking about writing screenplays for awhile now. So, I saved up all of the money in my piggy bank and bought myself a copy of Final Draft Version 8, a screenwriting software program. Well, it was kind of difficult to figure out how to make sense of it, but I’ve been playing around with it for a few weeks now, and this evening I decided to actually start work on a screenplay.

Well, kind of. I actually realized I needed to figure out how to write a screenplay before I actually start writing a new story. In other words, had to get past the how to before I got to the doing it stage. So, what I did was go back to one of my stories already completed and then work backwards. You see, some years back, I wrote a couple of movies in “fake” screenplay form and then choreographed a movie, which I then put together in The Movies software. I did a whole bunch of them. But I decided to go back to my favorite one and then rewrite the story from a screenplay perspective, rather than the seat of the pants version I did before.

And I’m discovering that writing a screenplay is a whole different animal to type of writing I normally do. But it’s a whole lot of fun. It’s a completely different process of writing that you never really figure on until you sit down and actually try to do it.

The story I’m working on is called Buried Memories, a romantic movie that is more my typical style of writing (meaning it’s not the usual kind of story you’re going to find anywhere else). As I’m taking some liberties with Buried Memories 2.0, it’s going to be a bit different and a lot more robust than the original version. Either way, it’s something new for me to play around with, and after I finish with this project, I’ll probably start writing a screenplay from scratch.

Anyway, if you’re interested in the movie that was originally done for this story, I’m going to try to embed it into this post for you to experience.

Buried Memories

Is it Possible for a Freelance Writer to Make it Today?

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This is one of those questions that has been going through my head lately. I’m one of those enigmas of writers who has written a lot of stuff, yet never really managed to break into a writing career. At one point, I had a good start, and then I just stopped, giving up writing, before realizing what a mistake I made. And then I realized I wanted it back more than anything. But I did it at the strangest time, when the Internet was just coming around, and suddenly the old way of doing things was no longer the way things were done. Now, I’m an overwritten writer who has pretty much nothing of a writing career, realizing that I’m probably never going to have one.

So, like most struggling writers, I tried to do the whole e-book thing, and I’m averaging about $25 every three months of sales. Not exactly the illustrious career to get one away from one’s normal day job. And when one has all desires to be a full-time writer, that gets extremely frustrating.

So I find myself wondering if there’s really a future for an unpublished writer who doesn’t just get lucky or happen to be in the right writing school at the right time. Again, being lucky.

I put my book of poetry on Amazon, and it’s done absolutely no sales. I’m not a salesperson, so I really don’t have the ability to figure out what one has to do to interest anyone in buying one’s writing. So the only other option is to just release all of my writing for free, which then still leaves me with the realization that that probably doesn’t make a difference either. People are less willing to read your stuff for free than they are if they actually went to buy it. Sadly, that’s kind of true. They find it has less value if you tried to give it away, so even if it was Hemingway trying to get bullfighters to read his latest book, it wouldn’t make a difference because the stigma is already there because of the whole free thing.

Which leaves me with the wonder if I should just give it all up. My career is going nowhere, and I honestly don’t anticipate it going anywhere in the near future. The only reason I haven’t given it up already is because I really don’t have anything else in the wings to replace it. My job isn’t going to make me happy. Watching TV isn’t going to give me any satisfaction in life. I don’t date and probably couldn’t recognize a woman if I ever saw one (as it’s been so long). Which leaves me with something I’ve been talking about for some time now. Nothing. Writing was pretty much it. And without it, I’m not sure I really have a reason for sticking around anymore. I mean, what’s the point?