The Lessons of 9/11

photog 4 Comments Current Events, Trump ,

Today is the twenty fifth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.  Well, I’ll leave it to the professional pundits to try and wax poetic about the deep historic meaning of the day.  What I will say about 9/11 is where I have now found myself.  I won’t review my personal links to the New York attack and my visceral desire for revenge and justice against those responsible for the attacks.  All that is now ancient history and buried under the aftermath of the politicians and bureaucrats who reshaped our world using our support as a tool.

All that I learned from everything that was done by the American government is that politicians as a class are at best useless idiots and at worst our mortal enemies.  Almost without exception the Republicans proved themselves almost as awful as the Democrats.  Their embrace of globalism and the contempt for the well-being of their countryman is stunning and unmistakable.  The Democrats are only worse because they openly embrace the agenda that the Republicans pretend to abhor but follow in stealth.

9/11 and its aftermath are responsible for Trump and MAGA.  He looked at the betrayals and the contempt and he employed the naked truth to drive the likes of JEB Bush and the rest of the useful idiots off the map and then banished Hillary Clinton to the ash heap of history.  And then he learned how Washington works and he relegated Kamala Harris to the position she deserves village idiot.  Trump has made plenty of mistakes.  This Iran war is devastating our wallets with high priced oil.  Maybe he had no choice.  I can’t say for sure.  But honestly Trump is attempting to bring manufacturing back to this country and I respect him for the effort.

But very soon he will be leaving center stage and it will be time to find a new champion.  At this anniversary of 9/11 I think it is time to start looking at the next generation of MAGA politicians and have them start auditioning for the top spot.  I don’t expect Vance or Rubio or DeSantis to start doing a bad Trump imitation.  It wouldn’t make sense and it isn’t necessary.  Trump already smashed the fun house mirrors and let us see the Republican and Democrats for who they really are.  What is needed now is for the new guys to speak honestly and clearly about where we go from here.  Trump was the disrupter.  Now we need builders.  The next president has to communicate with anyone left in the middle who hasn’t picked a side and convince them it’s time to move forward.  We have to put in place a program to reduce government to a size that allows us to end the deficit and begin to reduce the size of the debt.  And hand in hand with this is a program to continue Trump’s efforts to reindustrialize America.  These two goals are the key to reinvigorating this economy and country.  And finally tying back to 9/11, the next president has to finish the work Trump has begun closing the borders and deporting all the illegal aliens.  That would truly be the best tribute we can pay to the victims of those attacks.

Promos and Painter’s Tape

photog 8 Comments Book Reviews, Current Events, Life in Dunwich, My Fiction, photog's Corner, Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F Book Reviews , ,

Update:

Best Sellers Rank: #100 Free in Kindle Store (!!!!!!!!)

#1 in Political Thrillers & Suspense

#2 in Military Thrillers (Kindle Store)

#2 in Technothrillers (Kindle Store)

Overall promo update total 9/10/2026, 8:00 pm 1,762 e-books

9/10/2026 8:00 pm update 1,002 e-books

Order total for 9/9/2026: 760 e-books

Today is the second day of the Based Book Sale  https://basedbooksale.substack.com/p/call-for-authors-2026-basedcon-basedand my 5-day Amazon giveaway promotion for “The Sniper” https://amazon.com/dp/B0G7WRJJPH

 

 

 

I have to work Thursday but what I’d rather do is check my Amazon dashboard every thirty seconds on day two of the promo.  Currently I’m # 286 in the Kindle Free Store.

Best Sellers Rank: #286 Free in Kindle Store
#1 in Military Thrillers (Kindle Store)
#2 in Technothrillers (Kindle Store)
#2 in Political Thrillers & Suspense

Previously the highest I ever got was # 3,692.

Of course, I have to wonder what kind of numbers the top ten are pulling.  So as of 11:30 p.m. the dashboard says 700 orders have been processes.  Interestingly one (and only one) of those orders was a paperback book bought for $9.99.  Kaching!  And even more absurd I sold one solitary page on Kindle Unlimited today.  I think that’s about $0.005.

Well, this is panning out better than I expected.  At this rate I guess I should have a few thousand orders when all is said and done.  So, let’s say the first step is on course to be completed successfully.

Now comes the part that is completely unknown.  Will having a few thousand copies of my book out in the world improve sales?  According to the experts, it should.  Of course, assuming the promo readers like it.  If they don’t like it then maybe it will actually decrease my sales.  But currently I’m sort of in the dark about what to look for and how quickly I should expect any reaction to the promo.  But, being an engineer, I will immediately start building a spread sheet and perform a statistical analysis comparing the pre-promo and post-promo sales numbers.  I’ll submit the report to the ghosts of the “Big Three” (Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein) and await their comments.  But I will say I think I’ve acquitted myself of my responsibilities vis-à-vis marketing my book.  From now on it’s up to the big dumb reading public out there to hear about my book and buy it.  The free ride will be over after September 13th and they’ll have to plunk down ten US simoleons ($9.99) for a paperback or a fin ($4.99) for an imaginary copy.  I think I’ve been more than generous with my promos and price reductions and general easy-going attitude about receiving the moolah.  So, wake up readers, you’re on notice!

My biggest real problem is that my lawn mowers are both on the side lines.  The ride-on mower needs an oil change (since last year) but I’m too lazy and disorganized to do it.  So, I’ve been using my 2016-vintage Murray 20” walk-behind mower with Side Discharge, 7” wheels, and Briggs & Stratton 300E series 125 cc OHV engine.  But the damn thing is falling apart at the seams.  The lower handle is wobbling around and the wheels look like they’re gonna fall off.  But being the lazy good for nothing I am, instead of tightening it up, I took some painters tape and tried to hold the lower handle onto the sleeve that it fits into.  You know, it didn’t work.  So, after work tomorrow I’m going to try and reshape the lower handle so it wants to fit into the sleeves.  If that fails, I’ll probably go to Home Depot and buy a new one.  After all, this one has been working continuously through the era of Trump and that is not an easy thing to do, I can tell you that.

September 9th Begins the Promotion for The Sniper

photog 2 Comments Book Reviews, Literature, My Fiction, photog's Corner, Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F Book Reviews , , , , ,

Updates:

Time Orders
9:30 AM 100
11:00 AM 212
2:45 PM 400
8:00 PM 604
11:30 PM 700

At 9:30 a.m. I broke through the 100 order mark.  Not bad.  So far, all have been e-books but that’s the point of this exercise; visibility.  Excelsior!

Based Book Sale

 

Image

September 9th is the beginning of the Based Book Sale and also of a promotion I have set up on Amazon for five days of free e-books for “The Sniper.”  And this is the perfect audience for my book.  These are the people who the book was written for.  These are people who won’t be shocked that my protagonists’ enemies are antifa thugs and leftist color revolution spooks.  In any other “science fiction” book sale, the number of blue-haired feminists in the audience will be considerable.  But not here.

And as a great kickoff, the leader of the sale, Hans G. Schantz, bought a copy of my book and wrote a five-star review that was extremely fair, well-written and cogent (see below).  In fact, it makes me wish I had involved him in the early marketing of my book!

Hans G. Schantz

5.0 out of 5 stars A Satisfying Vigilante/Revenge Thriller

Reviewed in the United States on September 5, 2026

Format: Kindle Verified Purchase

“The Sniper is an unapologetic vigilante thriller built around a simple and satisfying premise: what happens when the system fails completely, and men with the means to do something about it decide they’ve had enough?

Joseph Boghadair begins with a deeply personal grievance: the murder of his son and the failure of the authorities to deliver justice. But his private vendetta soon expands into something much larger as he and billionaire Paul Connors uncover corruption reaching deep into the federal government. Revenge becomes resistance, and resistance ultimately becomes armed revolt against a government that has forfeited its claim to obedience.

That escalation is the book’s great appeal. Boghadair isn’t waiting for another investigation, another hearing, or another election. He is a former Army sniper who knows exactly what he can do with a rifle, while Connors possesses the wealth and resources to turn one man’s vendetta into a genuine challenge to entrenched power. There is something viscerally satisfying about watching supposedly untouchable people discover that they are not, in fact, untouchable.

Does it get far-fetched? Certainly. The conspiracy is enormous, the resources brought to bear are extraordinary, and events eventually operate on a scale well beyond the plausible consequences of an ordinary vigilante story. But realism isn’t really the point. The Sniper is political wish-fulfillment in the tradition of the revenge thriller: a story about what might happen if decent men confronted tyranny not with petitions and procedural niceties, but with overwhelming force.

Taken on those terms, it works. Fast-moving, cathartic, and refreshingly willing to follow its premise to its logical extreme, The Sniper delivers a satisfying tale of revenge escalating into rebellion, with bad men finally discovering that actions have consequences.”

Simultaneously I have five days of promotion of the Amazon giveaway with a company called Written Word Media that maintains a number of reader lists among which is something called FreeBooksy which (as you can guess) sends notification to its hundreds of thousands of users, the names of books that are free on Amazon that day.  And they have a package with five different lists to cover the five days of my giveaway.

So theoretically hundreds of thousands of readers can see my promotion and get my book from Amazon.  What will it actually turn out to be?  Well, we shall certainly see soon enough.  As an absolute minimum there will be at least twenty or thirty downloaders.  I’ve previously done a promotion and without any outside notification that number of Amazon readers will download the book every day.  But if that is the extent of the interest, I will be extremely disappointed.  Realistically, I’m hoping for several hundred downloads.  That would be acceptable.  But I’ll be honest.  What I’m really looking for is something north of a thousand total downloads.  That I believe would qualify as a real success for the promotion.

So, for the next five days I’ll be clicking on my dashboards on Kindle Direct Publishing every thirty seconds trying to psychically persuade everyone on the Based Book Sale, the Amazon site and FreeBooksy to download my book and then write breathless glowing reviews about the incredible plot, unforgettable characters and general literary splendor of this inimitable masterpiece.

Out of the way peons!  World famous author walking by!  Please no free autographs!