Wheelbarrows and Ogres

photog Current Events, Life in Dunwich, photog's Corner, Reclaiming the Family , , ,

We had Princess Sack of Potatoes over today.  She’s finishing off her Spring vacation from school.  And we haven’t had much of her time in a while.  Sure, she was here for Easter but her cousins were also here so I didn’t get much chance to spend time.  But today we had fun.  I’m installing a 270-gallon pond liner for Camera Girl, so I’m digging a big hole in the ground and working with a shovel, rake, pitch fork and a wheelbarrow so it’s like incredibly exciting for a little kid.  She wants to help and I have to find something that isn’t dangerous or too hard for a little girl but seems useful to her.  So, I told her to rescue earthworms from the pile of grass turf that I stacked up.  Perfect!  She can get her hands covered with dirt and give Camera Girl some worms for her hideous African Clawed Frog and I’m free to move some rocks and dirt.  After about an hour she had enough and went inside to bake chocolate chip cookies with Camera Girl and I continued on until lunchtime when I finished for the day and took a shower.  So, after lunch she wanted to watch the “Minions” movie which I’ve had enough of.  So, we went our separate ways.  But after that she wanted more movie time so Camera Girl suggested “The Princess Bride.”  The little girl agreed to watch it and I decided to join her to see how she reacted to this time capsule of a movie.

And it was pretty funny how her initial reaction to the movie resembled the behavior of the “grandson” played by Fred Savage when his grandfather (Peter Falk) began narrating the story.  Both the real and fictitious grandchildren were annoyed by the story beginning with a love story introduction.  And her reaction also resembled the child character whenever it seemed that the “heroes” of the story were losing to the bad guys.  There was a sense of outrage and the desire to quit the story.  It was only with great persuasion that I convinced her to hang in there after Wesley had been killed by “the Machine.”  And so, I was immensely pleased when by the end of the movie she was very satisfied with the happily ever after ending.

And after the movie I discussed her opinions about the film and she declared that her favorite character was the “Ogre.”  I corrected her by saying that Fezzik wasn’t an ogre but a giant.  And that André the Giant who played the part was a professional wrestler.  She was very interested in how he did some of the stunts.  I explained to her that the “holocaust cloak” wasn’t real and he was never on fire.  And I said he didn’t really have to climb “The Cliffs of Insanity.”  And the reason she liked him best was because he seemed very jolly.

After that she joined her grandmother in several very competitive games of checkers and then it was time for her to go home with her mom.  After she left, I inspected several of the historical photos of the Princess festooning our refrigerator and looking at a noticeably younger me and a tiny little girl in one picture reminded me very powerfully that the clock is ticking at an alarming rate.  But it was a good day to be a grandfather.

A Milestone and a Low Point

photog Life in Dunwich, Literature, My Fiction, photog's Corner, Science Fiction / Fantasy ,

So today I reached the two hundred book milestone.  One hundred fifty-three e-books and forty-seven paperback copies.  Camera Girl and I celebrated with a bowl of ice cream each.  And today I also got my first one-star review.  The reader was upset because he didn’t know it was a science fiction story.  And I can understand his anger.  When I selected the categories for the book the first one, I listed was science fiction.  But Amazon rejected this as a false description and deleted this category for the book.  And so, Amazon is responsible for the single one-star review I’ve received so far.  Well, the world is a complicated place and I guess nothing human is ever free from unexpected consequences.

But, all in all, it’s been an interesting experience.  It seems Amazon has created an opportunity for anyone to create a book and it even makes it possible to try and find an audience for that book in the enormous marketplace they have created on their platform.  And to the extent that I’ve found some readers I can appreciate how this is an improvement over what there was before.  And in my particular case it changes the situation from an impossibility to a difficult one.  And by that, I mean I could never have found a publisher (other than a vanity press) that would accept my story because of the right-leaning slant of my story.  After all I pretty clearly demonize Antifa in this story and that would never get past the editors and sensitivity readers employed by the “Big Five” publishing houses (Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group and Macmillan).  So, I think the present set-up is an improvement for someone like me.  But that doesn’t mean finding an audience is easy.  It’s not.  It’s tricky and slow and expensive and the skill-set has absolutely nothing to do with being a writer.

The next big milestone will be when I put it on Kindle Unlimited.  But since this requires the story to be on Amazon exclusively for three months I’m waiting until I finish putting the story up on Royal Road.  I’ve been uploading it in sections (mostly a chapter a day) and I’ve got six more chapters to go, so I want to finish that first.  I want to see what feedback I get once I’ve allowed the readers there to finish the story and evaluate it.  After that I’ll take the story down from BookFunnel and Royal Road and see what happens with Kindle Unlimited.  KU lowers the cost to start the book to essentially zero and I’m hoping that will allow a larger cross-section of the general reading population to give the book a try.

And I believe this population of readers will be significantly younger than the one I’ve been reaching up till now.  Now maybe this isn’t my target audience but I think it’s important to test that hypothesis.  If Kindle Unlimited doesn’t move the needle, then I know what I’ve seen so far is a good indication of what I should expect.  So, let’s see what happens.

The SPLC bankrolls the KKK

photog Current Events, Trump , , , ,

This week the Justice Department has indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center for fraud for paying white supremacist groups very large sums of money to play boogeyman for the Left.  Now, these weren’t undercover FBI agents they were real nazis and Klansmen who were among the leaders of these organizations.  And it was understood that they earned this money for providing the SPLC and other leftist organizations with talking points against conservatives and the Right in general.  And this has been going on for decades.  All the biggest outrages, like the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottsville, were included in the events that garnered funds from the SPLC for KKK and nazi groups.

Well, it’s official.  All the conspiracy theories that have been floating out there for years about false flag/color revolution operations by the Left and the Deep State were true.  If the SPLC was doing this just imagine what else is out there.  I imagine if the FBI could find the destroyed records, they would have proof that their own agents have done plenty of the same things for years.

But it is nice to see that while we still control the federal government some of the most outrageous frauds against the right will be exposed and punished.  The SPLC has one of the worst reputations for mischaracterizing conservative organizations as hate groups.  Last year they put Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA on their hate list and I’m sure that was one of the contributing factors in Kirk’s assassination.

I think it would be wonderful if the SPLC can be bankrupted and its leaders prosecuted both civilly and criminally to the fullest extent of the law.  People like this do untold damage and contribute to the degrading of freedom of speech and freedom of association.

It should be interesting as this develops to see what famous “nazis” turn out to have been on the payroll of the SPLC.  I’m sure many of us remember some of the more flamboyant “leaders” of far right from years gone by, that always seemed to cause more damage than progress for conservatives.  There may be a lot of answers to why every time a conservative moment arose some particularly idiotic leader seemed to surface and discredit the movement with a moronic statement or stunt.

This was something that I remember the ZMan used to speculate about.  For the most part he thought these people were just useful idiots who wanted the attention and gladly acted out the part of boogeyman de jour.  I’m sure this news would not have shocked him but it probably would have explained a number of specific characters and incidences from recent history that conveniently allowed the Left to use their Right-Wing White Supremacy narrative to demonize conservatives in all their favorite left-wing media sources.

Well, good work Kash Patel and the rest of Donald Trump’s Justice Department for exposing this organization for the fraudulent hate group they actually are.  I hope they get torpedoed this year and not later.