Writing “The Sniper” was a massive learning experience for me. Not only does it take up a lot of time but it also makes it much harder to do other things at the same time. And vice versa! Working, blogging and taking care of my other responsibilities really slowed down my book writing performance drastically. And the time has come to begin writing the sequel.
So, something is going to have to give. My decision is to cut back on the blogging. Believe it or not even knocking out five hundred words has been taking a couple of hours. And when I’m doing it at ten or eleven at night the quality has been way down. The old brain just doesn’t click like it used to at that hour.
So, what I see happening is the posts will be hit and miss. I’ll be able to keep the photos and quotes going without much strain. But if I find myself scrambling for a theme, I’ll let it slide until I’ve got one that makes sense. Quality over quantity. It makes sense.
So, my apologies for my laziness but I am a man with definite limits.
With all the strange things going on in our world it’s pretty easy to throw your hands up and say that there’s no hope for things to get better. You hear about the decline in education and the challenge for young people to find jobs when corporations are using artificial intelligence (AI) to replace most of the work that entry level employees used to do. And that doesn’t even include all the other madness that’s engulfed our society lately. I mean, the litany of dystopian phenomena is staggering so I won’t just list them again. Should we just give up?
No, we must do the opposite. We must return to basics and approach life by concentrating on the essential aspects of life and avoid as much as possible the “noise.” So, if all you hear about is kids degenerating into uneducated, psychologically unbalanced basket cases who lay around all day immersed in their cyber-world, then the thing to do is get involved in helping the kids discover what’s “real” in the world. Teach them real skills; how to work with tools, how to maintain their cars, how to repair things around the house, how to prepare for a job interview, how to talk to a girl in real life. Stuff like that.
There is no doubt that forces are at work that threaten the stability of our society. DEI and other identity obsessed programs have done terrible damage to the work place but bewailing this situation isn’t an adequate response. Young people have to be informed that “giving up” on life is not an option. Every avenue for advancement must be explored in this most prosperous country in the world. If only women and foreigners are allowed to be doctors and engineers then become car mechanics or carpenters or buy a small business and build it up yourself. But whatever it takes young men have to show initiative and the willingness to struggle to survive. Blaming “boomers” or global warming are just excuses and more needs to be done. And the way to show the young that there’s hope is by encouraging them and helping them with their struggles. Share whatever skills or expertise you have and help them discover how to persevere in a challenging environment.
I remember a movie where one of the main characters had a mantra, “Struggle and survive.” Well, that’s very good advice for our present day. Giving up seems to be what everyone says is the way forward. The answer to AI is a universal basic income (UBI) where the government pays you just for breathing and no work is required. Of course it will have to be the most marginal of existences. You’ll probably have to live in a closet and eat whatever crap they want to feed you. But the fact that this is being pushed by the Left shows that it’s a sign that they just want you to lay down and die. And that is exactly the philosophy (nihilism) that we must eliminate from the young it is basically a death cult and it has infected our society. And each of us involved in keeping our families alive will have to fight it.
One of my oldest friends has been advising me on the possibility of making a film treatment out of my book and sending it to Hollywood to become the next “Project Hail Mary.” What immediately came to my mind was Hollywood taking the story and making the evil president, Donald Trump and making Bogey a leftist trans-woman. Yikes!
But what was surprising is that there is actually an AI capable of taking my story and converting it directly into a film treatment. And it has an enormous capability to annotate the details necessary for actually filming the thing. There are notes on casting each of the characters (appearance, age, personality, voice), locations, special effects, visual effects, weapons, special personnel (e.g., armorer), special equipment, weapons, etc.
And then it used the dialog from the book and adapted it for the screen; shortened and elided from it to bring the screen time into a realistic movie length.
Now I haven’t finished going through this document but so far what I’ve seen seems very interesting. It’s basically my book. And that’s exciting. I was assuming the story would be too long for a movie without very serious pruning of scenes that I’m attached to. But we’ll see.
Now, I’m aware that Hollywood doesn’t make movies from books that don’t sell millions of copies. They’re looking for a built-in fan base for their product. So, no studio in their right minds would take a chance on spending potentially hundreds of millions of dollars on an unknown story. But it’s always fun to dream about these things.
And that brings me to Andy Weir’s story. He self-published “The Martian” on Amazon and only eventually got a book deal when he had already built up an audience for it on his own. And now he has two hit movies made from his books. Think about that. Someone who couldn’t get a publishing contract ends up with a smash hit movie that everyone in Hollywood probably hates because it has a white guy as its hero and he doesn’t have the usual diversity cast to allow the movie to be an Oscar contender. They broke all of Hollywood’s rules to make this movie by not having a girl-boss as the hero surrounded by the usual multi-cultural struggle session ensemble. It just brings tears to my eyes.
Chances are I won’t be duplicating Weir’s experience. My book is not an uplifting tale of human endeavor. Mine is a tale of revenge and destruction. I openly attack the Left and my heroes are identifiable people on the Right. So, no. I won’t be getting a Hollywood deal. Ever!
But despite all that I’m excited about what is now happening in Hollywood. The Ellisons bought Paramount and have now shut down the travesty that was Star Trek – Star Fleet Academy. They’re buying Warner Brothers and they’ll probably shut down the people making terrible stuff like “Supergirl” that’s coming out soon. And now we see Amazon/MGM making stuff like “Project Hail Mary (PHM).” That’s a pretty good chunk of Hollywood already. And with PHM looking like it’s going to break the $600 million mark and become a big moneymaker, even places like Netflix and Disney will say to themselves, “Hey, why can’t we get into some of that “normal film-making” that those other guys are doing and make money for a change? Let’s call that photog guy and get an option on, “The Sniper” before the Ellisons scoop it up.”
Both the mountain gorilla of Africa and the orangutan of Southeast Asia are critically endangered in their native areas. The gorilla in particular are down to about a thousand creatures. And the primary reason for this is that humans in their ranges are extremely poor and look on these creatures as “bush meat.” The conservation societies have done quite a bit to encourage eco-tourism to produce funds to increase the law enforcement to protect these primates from the locals. But there are many risk factors that end up adding to the cumulative mortality of these animals. The pet trade steals young apes for rich collectors and there are various markets for body parts (heads, hands and feet) of the great apes.
Now, these two species are far from unique in the conservation problems faced by rare animals. Rhinos, elephants and other megafauna are in danger of disappearing from Africa and Asia along with the mountain gorilla and orangutan. But I think there is an extenuating circumstance for making them a special case. Namely, they are remarkably close to the human family. Now the chimpanzee is actually closer. They really are a close cousin. But there are a lot more chimpanzees in the wild than either of these two species. Also, I dislike chimpanzees. They’re too much like humans. The level of aggression they demonstrate makes them far from an attractive target for my crusade. I think the personalities of the mountain gorilla and the orangutan make them a much more sympathetic and interesting subject for my project.
In a nutshell I propose that two small Hawaiian Islands be made into a permanent refuge for each of these species. Now I will confess I haven’t really worked out any of the logistics. Are there two islands big enough to support a large colony of each of these species? Does the US government have sole jurisdiction over any of these smaller islands? So right now, this idea is a pipe dream.
But I think if it can be organized, it would provide an enormous service for humanity. The extinction of either of these species would be a terrible waste of biological knowledge about species that are important relatives of humans. Even from the point of view of medicine and biological science they are priceless resources that shouldn’t be allowed to go extinct just because they currently live in third-world hellholes. Even from the point of view of neurological research, having two other primates so closely related to humans is something that in the future will provide enormous insights into the evolution of our brains.
And going along with the idea of eco-tourism, millions of people would pay good money to view these apes in an environment that doesn’t expose themselves to the dangers of entering the third world areas where these two species are native.
But from a non-utilitarian perspective, these are magnificent creatures that are fascinating for humans to observe and learn from. And I’ll bet if they were brought into a safe environment like Hawaii, I think they would start exhibiting behavior characterized by lower levels of stress. Aloha fellow Hominidae.
Eric Swalwell, the Democrat congressman who was running for governor of California has dropped out of the race and resigned from Congress after allegations of date rape and sexual assault have been levelled against him by four separate women. Ah, the Democrats the party of feminism. Amazing how these things only happen when they want someone to drop out of a race and he refuses. Up until now Swalwell was best known for his vehement attacks on Donald Trump and for an incident where during an interview on an MSNBC television show he farted so loudly that microphone picked it up magnificently. Eric we hardly knew ye. Farewell!
So, the peace talks between the Trump administration and the Iranians have broken down so Trump has said he will take over the Straits of Hormuz. Now, how dangerous is this situation? I can’t even imagine something not going terribly wrong. So, Trump is going to try and break the Iranians by cutting off all their oil money by blocking the tankers heading for China. This is a hardcore tactic. I guess it could work. I’m sure we’ll know pretty soon how this is going to end up. Good luck Mr. Trump. You will need it.
Trump is in a war of words with the Pope. Well, this one’s easy. I’ll back Trump. The last couple of popes don’t seem to be infallible. I’m not sure they were even Christians. More like the kind of atheists they turn into bishops in some of the trendy denominations. But I don’t think Trump should waste his time fighting with him. It’s a waste of time.
Well, we’ve reached the warm weather here this week. Today and tomorrow will both break the eighty-degree mark and I’ve turned off the house’s heating system for the summer. Of course, if the weather gods go berserk and send us one last Polar Express that will have to be reckoned with but we think we’ve paid enough for oil this year. And today I saw a good-sized butterfly fluttering around in the air. And since the forsythia and the daffodils are both exploding in yellow bloom, I guess it makes sense for some insect to be pollinating them. And finally, the raspberry leaves have burst from the ground all over the patch where I cut down the canes in March. From what I can see this will be an even better sized crop than last year’s excellent results. I’d say that the 10-10-10 fertilizer worked exactly as recommended.
We’re still waiting for Camera Girl’s pond liner to arrive from Home Depot. It’s two days late and somehow “delayed” less than thirty miles away. What can I say, Home Depot is not Amazon, that’s for sure. When it arrives, I’ll bring out the shovel, pick, giant pry bar and wheel barrow. I’m hoping there’s no ledge where she wants it to sit. But knowing what I do about this property there will be a few monster-sized boulders below the surface. Well, I’m sure there’s at least a few drops of ancient Egyptian blood in my Mediterranean ancestry so I’ll bone up on ramp building and practice singing spirituals. Happy Wednesday!
So, I put a chapter of “The Sniper” up on Royal Road about a week ago. And shortly afterward I received a rejection from them because the story was also on Amazon and this website (OCF) and I had to prove to them that both those copies belonged to me. They wanted me to add in my Amazon Jake Barter author page that I was putting the story up on Royal Road. So, I had to figure out how to do that and whether this would cause a bad reaction by Amazon. After all, Amazon sells my book for money and Royal Road lets people read it for free. Well, the day before yesterday I tried putting up the statement about Royal Road but the author page rejected the edit. It turns out that I couldn’t use Royal Road’s actual internet address on Amazon but I could just use the name of the site. And then I had to prove that OCF was my website by a similar message and then, voila! They put the first chapter of my book up on their site and so far, nine people have read it. Well, that not much. But I figure it’ll be fun to see if I can get much interest on that site.
Apparently, Gen Z frequents the site to read fan fic called “Lit RPG.” Now, my book is neither fan fic nor Lit RPG. So, it’s not certain that I will find an audience there. But I’m interested in testing the waters. I also put it up at BookFunnel and the good folks over at Whatfinger were kind enough to put up a link to that site and I got 14 e-mail addresses of people who downloaded the book there. So, a little at a time I’m getting more visibility for the book. I’m at 187 sales on Amazon and I’ve accumulated 34 ratings and 29 reviews with a cumulative rating of 4.7 and some very nice reviews that were definitely encouraging.
Once the experiments on Royal Road and BookFunnel have run their course I intend to put the book on KDP Select which requires the book to be exclusively on Amazon for at least 90 days. Supposedly the low-cost barrier to reading on this program will attract the maximum number of “eyeballs” to the story and I’m very curious to see how that effects sales. And I’m not particularly hoping to make a lot more money that way but rather I’m hoping for much more exposure.
So, the great book publishing experiment grinds on. My hopes for international fortune and fame have been dashed on the sharp rocks of harsh reality. My dream of movie studio executives battling each other in front of the Compound to see whose blockbuster offer would land the movie rights to this timeless masterpiece has gone up in smoke. At this point I’m negotiating with the Dunwich Middle School to have the sixth grade put on a one act play version of Chapter 1. Is this how Heinlein got started? How, the mighty hath fallen.
Dunwich is a very odd place. First of all, you’ll notice that it does not appear on any map of New England. And this is both an advantage and a disadvantage. On the plus side it limits the amount of traffic that traverses its roads. On the minus side it’s darn hard to enter and leave it. For instance, there are no gas stations in Dunwich so whenever I need to fill up the old gas tank, I have to find a way out of town and find my way back in again afterward. And it’s not a matter of just heading down any road until you reach the town limits. Strictly speaking there are no limits. If you travel on Aylesbury Pike past Sentinel Hill for about three hours you’ll come back to Sentinel Hill again. And if you turn off at Whateley Lane and go for about two hours, you’ll notice a singularity in the middle of the road. And if you get too close to it, you’ll be pulled in and find yourself in the alimentary canal of Yog Sothoth. And that’s not a good place to be. So, you can see that commuting is somewhat problematic. But for all of the locals it’s really just an acquired skill that is taught from father to son. It’s all a matter of geometry. Einstein believed that our space time was a variety of non-Euclidean geometry called Riemannian. And it is. However, Dunwich has a different geometry called Bishopian after the famous Dunwichian mathematician (or wizard) Septimus Bishop who measured the curvature of Dunwichian space and codified the equations for translating back and forth between the two universes.
The mathematics is too complex for most people without advanced training to follow. On a practical level if you close your right eye and squint your left and slam down the accelerator just at the right location on the Dunwich side, you’ll reach normal space. And from normal space if you close your left eye and squint with your right eye while slamming on the breaks you can return to Dunwichian space from some well-known anomalies.
For the most part this kind of travel is a routine. But every once in a while, something seems to go wrong. I was driving at night in a snow storm in Dunwich a few years back and I sneezed too hard and must have activated an anomaly. When I blinked my eyes open again, it was broad daylight and obviously a summer day in some warm climate. I found out I was in Tallahassee Florida and it was six months in the past. And this caused all kinds of problems when I got back to Dunwich and ran into my earlier self, watching tv in my living room. I had a devil of a time murdering my doppelganger and sinking him in the swamp. He seemed to know all of my fighting tricks and just refused to die like a good sport. Some people are like that.
If you go through my entire book looking for moments of humor, I think there are fewer than ten. And that is counting sarcasm as humor. I’m guessing that in an adventure story that’s probably not unusual. With a team of men that know each other pretty well, there will be a certain amount of banter which can be defined as humor. But, I don’t feel like I’ve fallen below some critical thresh-hold of comedic content.
But, at the same time, I have to confess that comedy is one of the things I greatly enjoy in stories. To my mind stories that do not have a certain amount of humor seem flat and lacking in interest. And for that reason, I was recently wondering if I could introduce a character in my next book that is a “wise guy.” And by wise guy I’m not thinking of the Good Fellas definition of an Italian American mobster as a wise guy. I’m harking back to my childhood when every block had at least one guy who was the clown. In my neighborhood we had a kid who today would equate most closely to an insult comic. He was a mimic and he could find a way to mock anyone and everyone. This often earned him at least a mild beating if the victims of his mockery pooled their strength to grapple him to the ground and pummel him until he shut up. But it was almost as if he couldn’t help himself. He was a slave to his craft.
Now I don’t intend to try and recreate that type of juvenile humor but I think I could make a character who doesn’t know when to shut up. I’m guessing I’d have to do a lot of work editing the dialog from this character because obviously that’s the kind of thing that pretty easily can be taken too far. As an example, look at the movie Dead Pool. This character shoots an almost endless series of insulting jokes at every other character in range regardless of whether they’re friends or enemies. For the most part it’s entertaining but at some points it can become wearisome. So, I understand that doing comedy “right” is a matter of balance and skill. And the other part of it is providing the “comic” with a foil; a straight man. So Dead Pool needs the haplessly earnest Colossus as the butt of a lot of his jokes. Building up a duo like that must be handled carefully so that these two characters can be more than caricatures. And all of this mustn’t take away from the main action of the story but merely come off as the personalities of the characters involved. It needs to seem organic to the relationship of the people involved.
Now after talking all that through, it seems like this would be a lot of work for not much gain to the story. But for whatever reason, I’m excited by the idea. Making the characters real seems to be as important to the writer as making the action exciting. I’ve found myself actually caring for my make-believe people as if they were real. Well, anyway, tonight I was thinking of humor.
Since I’ve had to use YouTube to learn how to perform the various tasks associated with publishing a book, my YouTube feed has filled up with the various subjects that authors seem to get involved with. So, I’ve been bombarded with videos on every aspect of writing, editing and marketing books. But this week I seem to have arrived at the crazy outer reaches of the book publishing ecosystem; namely, sensitivity readers. Now I had heard of alpha readers and beta readers. These are the first people you give your book to in order to get feedback on the story from normal people. This all makes sense to me. But sensitivity readers are something entirely different. Apparently, these are people who go through your book looking for reasons to be offended by your story.
Sensitivity readers will read your book and then provide you with hundreds of notes on all of the ways that whatever you say can offend a multitude of easily “triggered” types of people. One video talked about how story lines and even characters can upset a whole host of fragile readers. Women, minorities, blind people, deaf people, paraplegics, quadriplegics, gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, queers, “non-binary,” all the various kinds of “trans” people, women wearing septum rings, antifa supporters, pacifists, the homeless, meth heads, heroin addicts, other drug addicts, women with blue hair, the lactose intolerant, the gluten intolerant, vegans, poor people, pedophiles, other sex offenders, dyslexics, the neurodivergent, ADHD individuals and many, many more. The only ones they left out were the red-green color blind. That really ticked me off.
I looked at this list and realized that many of the people on this list might be offended by my book. After all my protagonist unleashes a non-lethal chemical attack on an antifa riot that includes many blue-haired women with septum rings and several sex offenders in their ranks. Without even trying I had unknowingly transgressed against the boundaries meant to be protected by sensitivity readers.
This made me sad.
Then I found out how much these people charge for their service (0.5 to 2.0 cents per word). For my book that would come out to between $325 to $1300. So, that’s a lot of money! Plus, I read that they literally come up with hundreds of items that must be “fixed.” Hundreds. That would take weeks to edit. So, I would be paying someone many hundreds of dollars to make even more work for myself at the same time as she made my book much less enjoyable for my target audience; normal people.
Well, I decided not to hire a sensitivity reader. But I felt guilty. So, to assuage my grief I instead watched a bunch of videos about sensitivity readers. And it worked out great. These videos are hilarious. To hear the various absurdities that get brought up by sensitivity readers to these terrified writers is to experience comedic genius. The things these people worry about are stunningly stupid. They’re worried about elves and goblins in fantasy stories being mistaken as dog whistles for different races and ethnicities. They worry about people being cured of diseases in the story making readers who have those diseases upset. And the funniest thing of all, the readers and the writers look exactly how you would imagine people who worry about such things would look like. It’s a wonderful life.
So now I have to start writing book two of my series. And boy, that’s a wide-open operation. You see I wrote the book based on the idea of a father’s revenge. And all the stuff that grew out of that was seat of the pants writing that came to me as things that would make the story more fun. I invented Connors to give Bogey a powerful friend who owed him. I invented Cutter to facilitate the impossible task of Bogey being invisible to the surveillance state. I invented Chastain to have a conflicted antagonist to provide resistance to the protagonist but also acknowledge the justice of his cause. All of these major characters and the plot elements they involve just grew out of the desire to tell Bogey’s story in an interesting and dramatic way. But Bogey’s crusade is over. He won. He steps out of the center stage. Now what?
It’s not an easy question to answer because I need a direction to go. Certain things are now baked in. The United States government nuked some of its own citizens. A shadowy tech giant took down Washington DC with a technology nobody (including me!) truly understands. This weakened United States is struggling to hold onto the allegiance of many states that have seen its unjust criminal actions exposed and want to free themselves from its tyrannical control. That’s a lot of stuff going on. It’s like the cue ball hitting the racked balls on the nose and scattering them across the table. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put things back together again. So, we have to dodge around the flying wreckage and wait for the ricochets to subside before planning the next move. Of course, I could cheat and place the next story five, ten or even twenty years into the future and announce some faits accomplis as ancient history. And I know that is the lazy way out but, after all, I am an extremely lazy man.
But all of that is still only the window dressing of the story. Hanging together a future history is relatively easy. What I really need is another character with as compelling a problem as Bogey had with his son. But really the two elements are linked. Bogey’s problem grew out of the injustice of the society he lived in and his war against this injustice gives the story its trigger but the larger effect also has to be an interesting story too. So, I need another personal story wrapped up in the tumult I have set loose on my imaginary world. So, what I’m looking for is a personal story that is tied up in the larger actions that I’ve unleashed and that takes the world in a direction I think will be interesting and lead to further stories and actions beyond. The only problem is where to start. Hmmm.
“I fear I have nothing to suggest at the moment, sir.”
“Come, come, Jeeves!”
“I fear not, sir. Possibly after I have seen the lady—-“
“You mean, you want to study the psychology of the individual and what
