All the Secrets of the Universe and Some Really Important Stuff Too!
That’s right get your free pdf copy of “The Sniper.” All that’s needed is to provide your e-mail address and view my harrangue at the end of the book to leave a review on Amazon. What’s fairer than that? Don’t answer that! It’s a rhetorical question as part of my sales pitch. Let me know if there are any problems with the download. This is my first attempt to use BookFunnel.
Click Here for Link to Sniper Giveaway
Update:
To verify my ownership of “The Sniper” for the Royal Road folks, I am adding this note to show I also control Orion’s Cold Fire.
We interrupt the daily progression of actual civil war to bring you a message about a fictional civil war story. I’ve finished the manuscript for my book, “The Sniper.” Now I’m looking for beta readers. I’m looking for folks to read the book and give me their honest feedback. Also I’d like to disseminate the book to friends and family who you judge would be a good fit for the book based on your estimation and if they agree to read it I’d like to get their opinions too.
I’m looking to get this book out to the largest group of people possible to see whether it is something that people will want to read. So after reading it if you think it’s appropriate for people you know let me hear that too. And remember, I’m not a fragile author. If you think it sucks, say so, but also tell me why you think it.
If you’re interested leave a comment to that effect and I’ll e-mail you a copy of the story. Now this is just a pdf. No nice cover, no actual paper. Just electrons. But I will guarantee that this sniper is nothing like the actual sniper we’ve had to hear about for the last week.
And just to remind you here’s the beginning of the book.
Chapter 1 – An Object Lesson
Joseph Boghadair was set up at a loophole in a small prefabricated metal building at the top of the mountain that contained the Icarus Mine. His .50 caliber sniper rifle was trained on the narrow road that led up to the mine. He could see a line of black SUVs about a mile and a half down the road and he was getting ready to start firing on the convoy. His first shots took out the engine of the lead vehicle thereby halting the convoy. His second volley took out the engine of the last car in line thus trapping the rest of the vehicles between. Then at a more leisurely pace he took care of the other eight vehicles. By this point the passengers were crouching behind their disabled cars and randomly firing handguns and automatic weapons in Joseph’s general direction with almost no discernible results.
After about half an hour a few of the men in black body armor attempted to reach a stand of trees about 300 yards away to their left. Joseph put a few well aimed rounds in front of their path and they quickly retreated back to the supposed safety of their not-so-mobile-autos. Joseph snorted wryly at their shyness.
An hour after that a helicopter approached the mountain from the opposite direction to Joseph’s loophole. Walking over to a window on the other wall he could see a distant Blackhawk approaching at relatively high altitude. Joseph then began his preparations for their reception.
Between crew and troops, the Blackhawk had a dozen men on board. And more importantly it had a couple of Hellfire missiles. From a very safe distance away it targeted Joseph’s position and fired. The missile struck precisely on target and obliterated the steel structure almost completely. All that remained was the foundation of the structure around the mine shaft, now clogged with debris.
The Blackhawk landed about three quarters of a mile from the mine entrance. At this point the agents, hunkered down behind their vehicles, began to stream toward the helicopter. By the time they reached the aircraft the troops had exited and were waiting for their rescued brethren to arrive.
FBI Special Agent in Charge, George Chastain assembled both teams and briefed them on the updated mission plan. “We will proceed to the mine head and look for any human remains. We will collect whatever we can retrieve for lab analysis and attempt to seal the mine head until qualified personnel can be assembled for recovery operations. It is presumed that the target, Joseph Boghadair was killed by the missile strike but we will take no chances. He was an extremely dangerous individual and should not be approached by anyone without backup and prior approval from leadership. In addition to his war record it is believed that Boghadair is responsible for the shooting deaths of forty-six people in the last six months with thirteen of those people being FBI personnel. No one enters the mine until remote sensing equipment is brought in. Alright, proceed.”
The agents formed two groups. Apparently, SUV agents and helicopter agents must not bond very well. But before they were more than a hundred feet from the helicopter the ground began to quake so powerfully beneath them that they were irresistibly knocked off their feet. And while they were clawing at the ground for dear life, they could see that the high ground where the mine head was located had collapsed into the earth. The roar of that collapse was more frightening than the initial earthquake and some of the agents hid their heads under their arms in abject terror. When the mountain stopped shaking the men started to collect themselves and stand up. When they looked around them, they were astonished. A circular pit had opened up centered on the mine head. It was a thousand yards in diameter and so deep that only blackness could be seen at its center. Several cracks had formed outside the circular pit. One of these had nearly swallowed the Blackhawk. It was on its side and half buried in the crevice. Its rotors were fractured and it wouldn’t be flying away from this landing.
Chastain went over to the edge of the crater and just stared down into the blackness below. Then he went back to his team and started giving orders to begin a retreat from the stricken mountain. He was trying to think of what he was going to tell his boss. Nothing reasonable came to mind.
Oh no more writer talk!!!
I watched a YouTube video about fiction writing. The premise of the video was that trying to learn how to write by the commonly accepted method of just writing a bunch of stuff and seeing if it’s any good is a hopeless effort. He distinguishes two versions of learning; the “kind environment” and the “wicked environment.” The kind environment is what we would call normal learning. So, if you wanted to learn carpentry or to play the guitar, you would study objective instructions on learning progressively more and more difficult skills in the field while receiving continuous feedback on your mistakes through a teacher or some objective test of your results.
He compares this to learning to write which he says is one of the worst cases of a wicked environment. Basically, you bang out a book on your own without knowing anything about the objective rules of what is good and bad and so your work has a thousand defects that you can’t even recognize. The only feedback happens after you work on a book for months and years. And trying to find objective criticism is extremely difficult. So it’s very difficult to improve.
As an example of the advice given by writers, he mentions Stephen King’s advice that writers should write a thousand words a day. But King also states explicitly that writing is a talent that cannot be learned but is inherent in an individual. You either have it or you don’t.
Now the video maker is someone who sells a program on how to become a writer. So, his point is that what new authors need is to have constant feedback from an objective judge on whether what they are producing is good or bad. He states that before you write a novel you have to first learn how to write a sentence, then a paragraph, then a scene and then a chapter. I guess that does sort of make sense. But I wonder how much it costs to become an author in his school? Well, I see his point about learning to write. It does seem that most of us haven’t gotten an objective teacher to tell us what’s good and not so good in our writing. Oh well.
But this guy has lots of other information on his YouTube channel and actually I found some things that are helpful. He is a big believer in free book promotions as a way to expand audience and advertise its presence to the larger reading audience. So, there are two promo strategies I’m lining up. The Based Book Sale is having a sci-fi sale in September that I hope to participate in and I also plan to set up a promotion on a site called Freebooksy that has hundreds of thousands of readers looking for a free read. Between these two efforts I hope to be able to distribute around a thousand copies of the book and that should be a large enough sample size to figure out whether the book is popular.
Well currently my book has sold a little more than four hundred copies. I guess that’s not so bad but I do hope to see an increase in sales month over month so I want to give it a boost this fall. Now as far as Stephen King’s statement that writing literature is an innate talent that can’t be learned, I guess I’m of two minds. I’m sure there are people who don’t have an inner ear for good writing and probably won’t ever write anything very entertaining. But I also think that training yourself to put together a good scene or an interesting plot line will greatly improve the quality of your books.
Spur not an unbroken horse; put not your ploughshare too deep into new land.
Sir Walter Scott
Well, we’re going through a cool-down here in Dunwich. It’s been in the low seventies today and rainy. I heard this will be going on for a week or so. That’s okay. With the kids going back to school it’s best if it’s not too hot. Most of the school buildings aren’t air conditioned so summer weather is truly oppressive especially while the kids are still in mourning over summer vacation.
I walked around in the rain and found some interesting bugs. There was a preying mantis and some hungover bumble bees holding onto the cone flowers for dear life. And then I found this really tiny, almost microscopic bight yellow spider. At least I think it’s yellow. Sometimes it turns out that these things are really some very light, bright green that looks yellow to people like me who are blind to green. Well, whatever color it was, it was sliding around on a strand of web and moving from flower petal to flower petal, trying to look like part of the plant. And maybe to someone with color vision, maybe because he’s some kind of green, maybe he does blend in. But to me he sticks out like a sore thumb. So, every time he flies off, I watch him trying to blend into his background. So, then I start trying to get good photos of him. But he’s unbelievably small and every tiny breath of wind shakes the flower stem and throws off my focus. So, I probably took dozens of frames that will be just blurred garbage and those files will add to the terabytes of photos that I should be deleting from my desk top hard drive but don’t.
But it was fun. I found a monarch butterfly chrysalis on a day lily plant. It was at least fifty feet from the nearest milkweed plants, so that’s an interesting bit of information that I can use in the future. I’m trying to decide if I should collect the chrysalis and try to photograph the hatching. I’m trying to decide what would be the optimal container to allow me to get the best photos of the hatching process. I probably will have to hurry because they only spend a week or two in the chrysalis and for all I know it may already be ready to hatch.
There’s talk about another kid’s movie in the near future for me. Princess Sack of Potatoes is back next week for the end of her vacation. The plan is to see the new Minions movie. Camera Girl is also a fan of these annoying yellow creatures so the three of us will experience this event together. Actually, the last Minions movie wasn’t so bad. It took place in the 1960s in New York and London and the music was very nostalgic. I haven’t looked into what the theme for this masterpiece will be but it’s a non-Disney production so that is at least one factor in its favor. Well, here we go into fall!
Who o’er the herd would wish to reign,
Fantastic, fickle, fierce, and vain!
Vain as the leaf upon the stream,
And fickle as a changeful dream;
Fantastic as a woman’s mood,
And fierce as Frenzy’s fever’d blood.
Thou many-headed monster thing,
Oh who would wish to be thy king!
Sir Walter Scott
Though I hate to admit it, I seen nothing in Trump’s temperament or previous governance to indicate that he is the man to do it. In his 1st term, there was nothing accomplished or even proposed that would indicate debt reduction was an even a low level priority. Remember the early covid days and the multi-trillion dollar public buyoffs sent as $2000 checks per family?
Reality is that the issue won’t be dealt with until reality shows that it ultimately WILL be dealt with. At some point, a tripwire will occur and hyperinflation will start. If you have a good memory and track retail prices, you will have to conclude that inflation has been significantly larger than officially stated. Especially since the covid era.
There is nothing on the political horizon from any political entity that indicates a willingness to take on budget and reduction.
Debt reduction will occur via inflation, whether severe or hyper remains to be seen.
The average US house is climbing toward $500,000, average car $50,000, hamburger over $7/lb, good ribeye $18+/lb, etc, etc, ad nauseam. “Tom’s Official Inflation Monitor Based On the Price of Cat Food” tells us that a 5.5 oz can of Friskies cat food which sold for $.38/can in 2020 now costs $.87/can. Everything else is on the same slope.
Solve for X ( 1+X%)^5= 2.3 Hint, around 18% per year.
And this curve will not prove to be linear.
What do you think is behind the historically meteoric increase in the price of gold and silver? I bought gold 20 years ago for $600/oz and silver for around $7-$8, an increase by a factor of around 8-10. A lot of the increase has happened since covid. Do I sense a commality here?
I suspect that most of the sorta recent increase has been as people and institutions see something coming and are looking for something more stable than the US dollar.
Picture by TomD BTW, part of a series I was commissioned to do for an Australian coin dealer.
So, we went over to see the grandkids and watch “Project Hail Mary.” I read the book a few months ago and I’d been waiting to see it with them but everyone has been so busy this summer we just never had a chance. But with school starting in Dunwich next week, I made a point of setting up the visit.
So, we sat down surrounded by all the kids and all the dogs and up went the curtain (metaphorically speaking). Well, it was pretty good. Of course, a movie couldn’t spend the time that the author Andy Weir lavished on the technical details of the astro-phage biology or the star ship that it fueled. And neither could it explain the project to selectively breed taumoeba to survive in Venus’s atmosphere and several other technical details that fill out the story. But the movie does a good job of fleshing out Ryland Grace and detail the friendship that develops between him and the Eridian alien that he names Rocky. And in fact, it more than matches the book’s description. It adds a good amount of comical interplay between the human and the alien.
I intend to do a full review of the movie soon but I just wanted to give a few impressions tonight. And since it’s so late I’ll leave it here. It’s a good movie.
Ridicule, the weapon of all others most feared by enthusiasts of every description, and which, from its predominance over such minds, often checks what is absurd, and fully as often smothers that which is noble.
Sir Walter Scott
