All the Secrets of the Universe and Some Really Important Stuff Too!
Here you will find the stuff that shouldn’t be mixed in the other categories but interest me. caveat emptor.
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
So, I’m making the plunge. I’ve joined BookFunnel and I’ll be running a giveaway for e-copies of the “The Sniper” starting pretty soon. The trick now will be to get as much visibility for the giveaway as I can. So, I’ll publicize it here (of course) and I’ll put up a post on X and I’ll tell everybody I can think of that likes this kind of story. My plan, such as it is, is to use the giveaway to garner as many reviews as I can and try to get the book more attention. And after that I’ll put it up on Kindle Unlimited to tempt the general public that tests out its fiction one page at a time.
Will it work? Well, I certainly hope it will but I’ll find out for sure whether I can interest the world at large. I was listening to the Critical Drinker interview Andy Weir about the success of two of his books being turned into movies. But I was just as interested in his story about self-publishing. His “The Martian” was self-published on Amazon and struggled to find an audience in the beginning. So, it’s kind of that one in a million-success story that inspires the other 999,999 writers out there toiling away in obscurity. So just to clear the air ahead of time, for the movie version of “The Sniper,” I want Adam Baldwin to play Bogey and Gary Oldman to play Cutter. Nick Searcy would make a good Chastain. As for Connors, I haven’t made up my mind. And the other parts are also up for grabs but definitely no Hollywood weirdos; that’s for sure. I think Christopher Walken would make a good President Miller. He’s always able to provide a memorably psychopathic character when required. Of course I’m hoping to get myself a bit part. Sort of like how Stan Lee always got a cameo in the Marvel superhero movies. Maybe I can be one of the clerks at the airport in Baghdad. I think I could really handle the part with style and finesse. Sort of a latter-day Olivier.
But I will say it is a little discouraging to see just how much grunt work there is in navigating the world of self-publishing. The experts don’t really seem to know that much more than the people wandering around in the dark like me. Sure, they have a sense of things like keywords and how to attach to other books that are already popular but it doesn’t seem like they can tap into any magic formula for shining a spotlight on a new book. It reminds me of that Glenn Campbell song “Rhinestone Cowboy,” “Where hustle’s the name of the game and nice guys get washed away by the snow and the rain.” Of course, that’s a little dramatic because I’m doing this from the comfort of my dining room where it’s relatively warm and dry. But metaphorically I’m pounding that digital pavement so I can sing the blues along with Mr. Campbell.
I was thinking about some of the comments on yesterday’s post “Persistence of Memory.” It was about detachment, “… it’s the consequence of the rootless existence that has evolved to be the American path.”
And I replied, “You are correct about the path. We’ve atomized our existence. We’ve monetized our lives to such an extent that we almost don’t exist except as consumers. We’re just cogs in the machine. It’s inhuman.” And that stuck in my mind.
And today I got a call from a friend whom I knew from high school. He lives in Hawaii and only comes home to Brooklyn once a year at Christmas. And we talked about meeting up next Christmas. Now I haven’t seen him in thirty years. I wonder if he would even recognize me. And we’ve managed to speak on the phone every Christmas but we haven’t interacted other than that. Well, I sent him a copy of my book and he called me up today and it was like a time machine. He was laughing and saying how he always thought one day I’d write a science fiction story. He was very complimentary and said he really liked the story and of course that was very gratifying. But in the back of my mind, I was thinking what a strange world we live in. Here was one of my best friends in the world and I hadn’t seen him for almost half a lifetime.
And so that conversation reinforced the statement, “… it’s the consequence of the rootless existence that has evolved to be the American path.” Our way of life is somewhat related to the nomadic existence of herders. They move to follow the grazing grounds of their herds. There is no one home. But our way is even worse. Because the herders live in tribes or at least extended families that move together from place to place. But we separate into at most nuclear families and often just single individuals, moving from job to job and city to city without anyone permanently included in their “tribe.”
I’m pretty sure that none of this is sustainable. And maybe that’s why corporate America is backing a policy of wholesale immigration to provide a steady supply of new workers that Americans are no longer providing from their own descendants. After all, how do you produce a family when all you are is a nomad living from job to job without a family to prop you up and give you help when things get tough or you need the resources to get married or buy a house or pay for expenses associated with children?
And this gave me an idea for my next book after “The Sniper.” It should have to do with the smartest and richest guy in the world trying to fix “the American path.” If someone powerful enough wanted to restore our country to viability, what would he think to do? Maybe he’d redefine the partnership between communities and corporations. Would it be a feudal system or a socialism? Or neither. I haven’t figured out what my “utopia” will be based on. Maybe I’ll wave “artificial intelligence” around as my deus ex machina. But I do want to think about it a little. How do you go about fixing the world?
I was at my mechanic’s shop to have the rear brakes replaced on my “new” car. Well, long story short, getting replacement parts from Toyota was going to take longer than expected so I couldn’t wait around. I called Camera Girl for a lift home. While I was waiting for her, I started reading some of the stuff he had on the walls of the shop. There were photos of the cars the shop was selling and the first one was from 1930. That’s ninety-six years ago. And the place has had the same last name all this time. Now Steve looks to be about my age. That means his grandfather was probably about thirty years old in 1930 (in that ballpark). Looking at those photos and illustrations from the 1930s was interesting. His grandfather and probably his father and maybe his uncles have been working at this business for generations. That would explain why he seems unflappable with respect to mechanical problems. You probably see almost everything when you’ve been working around cars your whole life.
And here was this company in a tiny town in southern New England lasting for generations and serving a community that know each other from birth to death and beyond. And that got me thinking of where I came from. The Brooklyn neighborhood where I was born was just as solid to my eyes when I was young. The people had been there for generations. They had their traditions and institutions and a sense of community. There was a feeling of permanence. But that was an illusion. All it took to annihilate that illusion was crime and poverty. And over the course of time that entire neighborhood disappeared without a trace. I’ve been back there, mostly for funerals. And that’s the funny thing. The Catholic church is still there although it has all the masses in Spanish now. So, the old people come back for their funerals and then they’re driven out to be buried in Long Island. And then their children and grandchildren disperse back to the four corners of the Earth.
So that’s the difference. New England still has towns and those towns still have families that live here for generations. Maybe not everyone stays put. But enough so that you can feel like you come from a place that isn’t just going to blow away when the wind shifts. And I think that’s actually something worth having. We’ve been programmed to believe that we can drift across the continent finding work where it happens to be and move our kids and expect that everything will be like it was when we were kids. But I don’t think it works that way. You don’t have traditions without permanence and you don’t have a neighborhood when you don’t even know who your neighbors are. And if you only see your family at weddings and (worse) at funerals, then how quickly will family become strangers? Well just something I thought about while waiting for a ride.
Let us speculate that humanity survives its intellectual infancy. Let’s imagine that it’s now 10,000 A.D. (that’s right, the Year of the Lord) and our smartest Earth scientists have calculated that by 100,000 A.D. the Earth’s magnetic field is going to shut down for good. I have no reason to believe this is an accurate number. By all accounts we should have many millions of years on the warranty for the magnetic field but just let’s say for the sake of discussion it will.
Well, there we are ultra-modern humans with a world government, a genetically engineered genome that includes a third set of teeth and a three-hundred-year lifespan. We hear that our distant descendants are going to lose their atmosphere, oceans and have to wear SPF 50,000 rated sunscreen for days at the {dry) beach. So, what will they do? Well, with a ninety-thousand-year window of opportunity, if they’re my descendants they’ll probably waste the first twenty thousand years dithering. After that they’ll start engineering the crap out of their options. But what will that be? Let me try to guess.
So, the Earth’s liquid iron core produces a magnetic field because it is a moving electric field. So, all we have to do is produce a moving electric field between Earth’s atmosphere and the sun (and to a lesser extent all of the universe around us. Well then shouldn’t we install solar panels in orbit around the Earth and run a current through a really long piece of copper wire that is moving and thereby set up an electromagnet? Now someone with any kind of electrical engineering knowledge or a physicist who specializes in E-M would slap me across the face and say, “What the hell are you rambling about?” And he would be right. But just for the sake of getting through this exercise let’s say that it is theoretically possible to have a framework around the Earth that converts solar energy into enough of a moving electric field to induce a magnetic field as strong as the current field we enjoy today.
Postulating that, is it technically feasible? Or would the amount of mass needed to create this device be completely ridiculous from the point of view of the energy needed to boost it into space ? Would the weight of the conductive material and the photoelectric cells be just so enormous that it would be beyond all of the resources of even a distant future civilization to put in orbit from Earth?
Now this is a cheat. I don’t know the answer. I haven’t tried to estimate the amount of material needed to produce such an enormous electrical field. Something with a diameter of more than 24,000 miles and with the structural integrity that that requires seems absurd. I, of course am aware of the science fiction convention of a ring or (Dyson) sphere around a star used to harness some significant portion of the energy output of the fusion reaction going on inside every star but I don’t know that anyone with enough of a technical background has tried to do a back of the envelope calculation to see if the numbers are just too scary to make any sense.
So, I’ll throw this one out to the readership. What have you heard?
Human beings of one sort or another have existed on this planet for a few million years. But only in the last ten thousand years have we existed above the level of stone age hunter-gatherers. And only for the last five hundred years have we begun to understand the rudiments of science at a level high enough to give us a glimpse of what surrounds us in the universe. Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton began opening up the window to what the Earth is and how it interacts with the Sun and the Moon and how we are related to the other planets and just how far away the stars really are.
And because this knowledge is only a few hundred years old I guess I should forgive us for not having thought deeply enough about what our future looks like and what things should be on our list of stuff to think about. For instance, only recently have planetary scientists started asking why are all the other planets completely unfit to sustain life? And this may seem like a silly question but look at it by asking the inverse question, “How did Earth win the jackpot and have basically everything we need to make this place a paradise stuck in the middle of a series of hells. We’ve got the right distance from the Sun. We’ve got a molten iron core to produce a strong magnetic field to protect us from solar and cosmic radiation. We’ve got a deep atmosphere. We’ve got liquid water in abundance. We’ve got all of the chemical elements available due to vulcanism. And most importantly we’ve got life in absolute abundance.
Now look at the rest of the planets. Mercury is ridiculously close to a titanic fusion reactor. Venus and Mars are close to the habitable zone in terms of solar orbit. But Venus is a greenhouse oven and Mars is a frozen lifeless ball with no atmosphere to speak of and no water. As for the outer planets they’re not even close to being places where life could even start. Jupiter is more like a failed star and Saturn, Uranus and Neptune are frozen hells where liquid nitrogen takes the place of water. A case could be made that some of the moons of Jupiter and the other gas giants may have subsurface oceans of liquid water underneath thick layers of ice. And due to magnetic interaction with their primary world, they could be at temperatures and pressures where life is theoretically possible to exist. Sure. Why not?
But once we get a little smarter and a little more organized it’s going to be time to start thinking about what challenges will planet Earth be faced with in the distant future. Now, I’m not specifically talking about the distant future, billions of years from now when the Sun runs out of hydrogen and starts becoming a red giant. That’s too far in the future for even me to worry about. But as a for instance, what happens if the magnetic poles switch off and then reverse direction? That sounds kind of crazy but it does happen fairly regularly. And sometimes the field just weakens significantly like the last one about 42,000 years ago. If the field disappears soon, it would probably wreak havoc with all of our satellites that currently benefit from the Earth’s field protecting them from charged particles to a greater or lesser extent.
Now things like this have been postulated in science fiction stories but when we get around to growing up, we will have to spend a good amount of time figuring out how much time we have before the Earth starts reaching its middle age and stuff starts working less optimally. I’ll think about some “for instances” in the next installment.
So, Tuesday I have a meeting with my marketer to see how I can achieve more of my goals for the launch. The book seems to be sustaining sales but I’m not satisfied with the visibility with respect to reviews and general profile. As I’ve mentioned I’m going to find out just how large a giveaway I can expect to perform. Now, I have no idea whether this makes any sense at all. After all, as a tactic giving something away for free seems to be defeating the purpose of sales. But my whole reason for writing this book, is to get other people to read it too. And if you’re competing with literally millions of other books and some of them have multi-billion-dollar companies marketing them then it may take extreme methods to break out of obscurity and catch the public’s eye. And then again, I may just be kidding myself. But I think I’m very close to making a decision on the path forward.
And there’s not much time left before I’ll be overtaken by other responsibilities and projects. First Selectman Cthulhu has selected me as his personal spokesman with responsibilities for communicating his agenda to both the human population of Dunwich and also the trans-dimensional realm of the Great Old Ones. That’s right I’ll be updating his LinkedIn and TikTok pages. Currently he’s asked me to edit out the use of words like crush, dismember, maim and devour in his recent communications. He’s up for re-election and he needs to finesse his image quite a bit. I’ve suggested he watch several of the recent Godzilla movies and figure out how to mimic the joie de vivre of that radioactive reptile who has managed to cultivate a laid back and avuncular style in the last few years. I told him he might want to think about a facelift. But then he reminded me that technically he really doesn’t have a face. It’s more of a foot with eyes, mouth and tentacles. Well, a rose by any other name.
On the home front, Mr. and Mrs. Mallard have returned to dismal puddle and seemed very satisfied with whatever slop has run into the swamp. Also, a pair of wood ducks have also appeared but I notice they are much more skittish than the mallards. Well, it takes all kinds. So far, we haven’t seen any ducklings. Time will tell.
And I’ve cut down all of the raspberry canes and put about five pounds of 10-10-10 fertilizer on the bed in anticipation of a bumper crop this year. I’m hoping it will expand significantly beyond the current patch and eventually triple into the whole garden. This is a matter of turning necessity into a virtue since nothing else seems to flourish besides raspberries in that soggy area.
The southern ice sheet has retreated back to the massive driveway pile which is now only three feet high. At the current rate of retreat, I calculate it will disappear completely by Memorial Day. At which point the last of it will end up in my drink cooler for that barbecue event.
Well, things are moving apace. Excelsior!
According to Grok the vernal equinox occurred on Friday, March 20, 2026, at 10:46 a.m. EDT. At that time Camera Girl and I were probably in Walmart buying eggs, coffee and chop meat. When we got to the register the cashier was this friendly talkative old lady who wanted to tell us that if we took out one of our eggs, we could balance it on its end. She explained that it was because of “the e-quick.” Well, she was a very nice lady so I smiled and said, “That’s great.”
The reason I was along on this expedition was because Camera Girl’s twenty-year-old ride (Nelly) was in the shop and the surgeon wasn’t too sanguine on Nelly’s future. The brake lines were leaking but when Dr. Steve put her up on the lift, he found metastatic rust throughout the length and breadth of poor Nelly. Camera Girl was devastated and so was my bank account. The surgeon asked if a mercy-killing wasn’t the best option but as a devout “right to lifer” I said, “No!!!!” So, Dr. Steve left me with the sad news and said it would take a few days to get the parts and finish the work.
But when we got home slightly after the equinox, there was a message from Dr. Steve saying we could bring the patient home. We rushed to find Nelly looking alive and well. Dr. Steve said it was “a miracle.” Nelly wasn’t as far gone as he had initially thought. And equally importantly it hadn’t cost as much as I had feared. So, Camera Girl and Nelly were reunited. They drove home together and later on I celebrated this Equinox Miracle with a bowl of vanilla ice cream.
But the larger lesson I’ve learned is that nothing lasts forever. Not even blue Toyota Corollas. The power of New England winter road salt is existential. The body of a car may look pristine with a bright paint job and a functional cd player in the dash board. But the mortality that follows from chloride corrosion cracking is as final and fatal as death itself. Nelly has served us faithfully and well. And generations of our dogs have had their own blankets on the back seats that they relax on during trips to the vet’s office and the nail clipping place. And decades of grandkids have sat in the back seat elbowing each other and complaining about how cramped they are. But very soon all this will be disrupted. They will notice that Camera Girl’s old car is no more. And she is very sad about the whole thing. I am too! I have to buy another car.
Well, never look a gift horse in the mouth. We’ve been given a reprieve and I’ll start figuring out what Nelly II will be. And it turned out to be a nice day walking between stores and parking lots and I even had a nice review for my book on Amazon and some more sales. So, all in all it wasn’t a bad e-quick as e-quicks go.
Today I sold my 150th copy of “The Sniper” on Amazon and I’m looking to get more reviews and ratings. So to increase the availability of the book I’m looking to send complimentary (free) e-book copies to folks here on the website who want one.
Just e-mail me here and I’ll send one back to that e-mail address. Feel free to be honest with your review. It’s better to get honest criticism than fake praise.
Just as I planned, we ate a late and leisurely breakfast today. It was as warm and sunny as forecast. Walking out in the sun by a frozen lake was very enjoyable and I even took a few photos just to prove I still remember how. Then Camera Girl and I drove over to the big city (ha!) and had some Thai food. Splendiferous.
I went over the communication I received from my book marketer and set up what I hope is a productive post-launch meeting where I can finalize a plan to finish off the launch with a large number of readers getting their hands on the book in the next week or so.
Apparently, there is a website called BookFunnel that will allow me to run a giveaway in exchange for the customer’s e-mail address. This will facilitate follow-on advertising of my sequel books and other writing projects. In conjunction with this the marketer thinks I should produce a follow-on epilog or teaser to entice the readers to sign up for some program of material that I will produce in the future. All very interesting, but what I’m also interested in finding out is whether the traction I created with the launch is indicative of a book and sequels that will be popular or not very popular. I basically don’t have any real knowledge about what a popular book start-up looks like.
I’ve sold a little over a hundred and twenty copies to date and that doesn’t seem to be an overwhelming response by the book buying public. I was hoping for more like a hundred and twenty million copies or even a hundred and twenty thousand copies. I’ve had to cancel my rental of MetLife Stadium for my book signing event. Instead, I’ve taped together three or four of the boxes that Camera Girl gets her dog food bags delivered in and set them up in the lower driveway. I hope it doesn’t rain soon. That tape’s not so strong. I’ll be giving away free key chains with the name of my local mechanic on them. He had them out on the counter and I thought he wouldn’t mind if I took a few (or all) of them. I don’t think he bought one of my books so I think it’ll be alright.
For my next book, maybe I’ll attempt to reach viral status using a best-seller adjacent name. In other words, I’ll make it sound like some other popular work. For instance, “Reacher” is a very commercially lucrative series. So maybe I could have a series with a character named “Reached.” He could be like Reacher only in the past tense. So instead of being enormously large and strong I’ll make my character big but kind of old and worn out. Sort of like Reacher in thirty years. And he could fight crime but only in retirement villages and old age homes. And his tag line will be, “What did you say? Speak up you young punk!” I think it could be huge.