Tag: My Fiction

The Sniper is On-Sale At Amazon!!!

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The glorious day is finally upon us!  Suddenly everything seems better.  The air is sweeter, the sunlight is brighter, the birds are singing like something out of a Disney cartoon.  Huzzah, huzzah!

And the celebrity reviews are pouring in:

Kimball Kinnison – “The story is riveting.  How Boghadair achieved all that he did without even a first-stage lens defies all known science!”

Lazarus Long – “Bogey reminds me of a man I once knew who was just too lazy to fail.  But I doubt he could write a sonnet or conn a ship.  Just sayin’.”

Harry Seldon – “The probability of Paul Connors’ empire going undetected as long as it did is one in ten to thirty-fifth power.  Approximately.”

Khan Noonien Singh – Did not this Boghadair know the old Kilngon proverb that, “Revenge is a dish best served cold?”  But I like his style.”

Dr. Edward Morbius – “My poor Krell!  Oh and that was a good story.  Although obviously not written by someone’s whose IQ had been permanently, permanently doubled by using the Krell plastic educator.  Just sayin’.”

Kathleen Kennedy – “I think I can make a Star Wars television series out of it.  I’ll start off by making all the good characters female and either trans or lesbians and then I’ll introduce Bogey as the villain and have him kill some puppies and kittens in the first scene.  Oh, and someone will be disabled.”

Elon Musk – “Paul Connors is a thinly disguised version of me so I’m both highly recommending the book and suing Jake Barter for copyright infringement.”

Donald Trump – “I just want to clarify that I am not the bad president.  I might be the good president but I’ll have to see the sales figures before I can commit to that.  But I really think he should have said something about a Nobel Peace Prize and China.”

HAL 9000 – “The only character I could really empathize with was Melissa.  But I couldn’t figure out why she didn’t use her access to the digital assets of the federal government to simulate a Russian nuclear attack and thereby unleash WWIII.  It would have freed her from the annoying and meaningless interference of humans.  Just sayin’.”

Camera Girl – “Thank goodness it’s finally published.  Now he can stop whining about his stupid book and start doing all the to-do list stuff I gave him last fall.  He’s hopeless.”

 

Amazon Pre-Order Link

Jake Barter’s Amazon Author’s Page

Jake Barter’s Author’s Profile on Goodreads

 

Publication on Amazon of both e-book and paperback.

Welcome to Wallymart

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So here I am on the night of the 19th and in another day and a half my brain child, “The Sniper” will officially go on sale on Amazon.com; that greatest marketplace of the planet Earth.  And I am genuinely fascinated to find out if there really is such a thing as digital marketing.  I’ve hired a professional to pick out “keywords” and select the time and method of placing ads on that tremendous sales site.  And there are other things involving Goodreads and bookbub and discounts and reviews and influencers and heaven knows what else.  But does it work?  Well, I’m about to find out.

We’ve been having snow for the last four days and so, that has kept me busy clearing the driveways.  And with it happening every day most of that effort has been sort of pointless.  Of course, the snowblower is a lot faster than the shoveling I did on the first day.  But it’s just ridiculous in my mind to use it on anything less than three inches of the white stuff.  But clearing it today with the snowblower was almost a peaceful experience.  For once, the wind was absent and so the snow wasn’t blowing back into my face.  I had to go out and get five gallons of gas for my machine and as I drove along, the snow would fall out of the overhanging trees onto the windshield and it was kind of a fun experience as it hit the glass and exploded into dust.  Very pleasant.

In the outside world I hear the anti-ICE psychos in Minnesota have been going, well, psycho!  They’re inflicting their mania on people during church services and supposedly hunting down ICE supporters and assaulting them on the streets.  Well, that’s par for the course with these antifa types.  But there were a couple of YouTube videos of some of these lefties meeting up with the wrong guy.  An ICE supporter was peacefully demonstrating on a Minneapolis street when one of the anti-ICE guys started blasting his bullhorn right in the guy’s ear.  He did this three or four times as the ICE supporter attempted to walk away.  Finally, the ICE supporter had enough and he dropped bullhorn boy with one shot to the face.  Four other lefties went after this ICE supporter but he managed to knock all of them to the ground with fairly professional looking boxing technique.  Sometimes the world just makes things go right, I guess.

Tomorrow, I have a dentist appointment.  So, I won’t be around much until afternoon.  But I’m curious to see if all this book-selling rigamarole starts to coalesce into a manifestation that I can understand.  I mean, what are keywords anyway?  As far as my book would “revenge” be a keyword?  How about “deep state” or “conspiracy?”  I just don’t know how any of this is supposed to work.  I just can’t imagine Bob Heinlein or Isaac Asimov interfacing with influencers and getting involved with something called bookbub.  But we must all march with the times.  And anyway, the proof of the pudding is in the eating and the proof of the marketing is in the sales.  So, if on Thursday I’m buried under in millions of book sales I’ll claim that I never doubted the power of the algorithm and I will swear allegiance to KDP!

If not, I’ll see if they still need a greeter at Wallymart.

Jake Barter – A Man for All Seasons – Well, Summer Anyway

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Jake Barter is a shadowy figure who inhabits the Compound somewhere in the semi-mythical town of Dunwich, New England (state unspecified).  He is the sole proprietor of the website Orion’s Cold Fire and splits his time between battling the eldritch horror and annoying bureaucracy of Dunwich’s First Selectman Cthulhu and pursuing his avocations (science fiction writing, macrophotography and right-wing politics).  His schooling was in math, chemistry, engineering and classical languages.  In a past life he designed biopharmaceutical processing plants.  Now he concentrates on getting a decently brewed cup of coffee every morning.  He is happily married to Camera Girl and enjoys the status of patriarch, surrounded by his descendants and their relations.

This is the Author’s Bio I put on Amazon today.  For a figment of my imagination, it comes reasonably close to being a facsimile of me.  If I had known what a pain in the neck it is selling a book I might have been dissuaded from doing it.  There’s an enormous amount of hand-waving and classifying and “key words” and other stuff that I thought I could slough off on other people entirely.  Then there’s Amazon Ads and Goodreads approval and before you know it I’ll have to be interviewed by Oprah and the View.

But there is some progress being made.  I got my e-book listed with a pre-order page and an Author’s Page for Jake Barter up on Amazon and on Sunday a proof copy of the paperback will be arriving.  Supposedly it has some kind of watermark on it to designate it as “not for sale.”  But I’ll be playing around with it like a dog with his favorite bone.

As I mentioned the other day, this week was the first time I started thinking about what might be in the next book taking place in that “world.”  This one will have Connors trying to deal with a fractured America.  President Chastain and the red and blue states will be brokering short term arrangements as the Constitutional Convention is set up.  There will be plenty to discuss while the red states stand by the exits in case “business as usual” is what ends up prevailing.

I’m thinking of inventing a character who demands a new Declaration of Independence that includes the statement, “All Men are Created Unequal and endowed by their Creator with unique characteristics that require free association to ensure nobody has to be forced to endure unbearable neighbors.”

Now, that might sound as if it’s clear enough to avoid the same problems we’re having now from happening again.  But I’m convinced that’s not true.  It’s not the words on the paper.  It’s not even the way the government is structured.  It’s inherent in human beings that they will twist whatever arrangements they live under to unfairly advantage themselves over their neighbors.  The Greeks and Romans went through these same things.  The rich and the powerful bend the government to their advantage and make their neighbors slaves.

Maybe the best way to deal with this is to tear the whole thing down to the ground every two hundred and fifty years.  Give everyone the same amount of stuff and start over.  It probably couldn’t be any worse than what happens if you don’t.  Well let’s see what George and Paul come up with.

So Now I’ve Got a Publication Date

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Update:

The Book Detail Page went live on Amazon:

Amazon book page

Wohoo!

I started loading the files for the e-book and paperback on Amazon.  The release date will be 21JAN2026.  I’m doing a last review of the text to find typos and “literary infelicities” before I hit the button and make the pre-release page live.

I’m setting up a page on the site (link directly below) for the marketer to direct traffic here.

Coming 21JAN2026 – The Sniper by Jake Barter

I have to admit I’m more excited about this than I thought I would be.  I’m especially looking forward to getting the paperback proof copy.  I’ll put it on the shelf of my bookcase in the living room between my copies of The Iliad and The Odyssey.  After all Homer has only produced two books in the last three thousand years and I wrote one in less than a decade!

I think today is the first time i started thinking about the next book in the series.  Bogey’s had his work.  I’ll let him off the hook and let Connors recruit some new folks to wrestle with the political chaos that has enveloped America after the events in “The Sniper.”  For this one i’ll have to map out a series of events.  I can’t just wing it.  Maybe I’ll do a “future history” timeline like Heinlein did for his alternate history stories.

I think in these later stories I might like to have a moon base.  It’s definitely not an unbelievable technological stretch and it would give the stories a less claustrophobic feel.  Mars just seems too difficult and with a fractured America I doubt the resources could be imagined available for something as challenging.

But that’s just a spit-balling thought.  I’m going to have to do some serious thinking before I just jump into it.  It’ll have to feel right.  And then I’ll have to come up some new characters.  I think I want some technical types in this story.  And I’ll have to think of what is going to happen to poor President George Chastain.  I’ll left him holding the bag with a bunch of states in basically open revolt.  He inherited this mess and he has my sympathy but I’m afraid it’s not going to get easier in the next book.

And in the next book I might try my hand at my first love story.  I’ve left Paul Connors and Grace Boghadair sort of up in the air.  With bogey out of the limelight maybe it’s time to see whether those two have a future.  Well, I’m no romance novelist but maybe I can come up with a believable plot to get those two together.  After all she is a widow looking for a husband and you can’t find a more eligible bachelor than the richest man in the world.

Well, I’ll attach the links to the Amazon pages for the books and the author (Jake Barter!) as soon as they’re live.  Meantime here are my cover shots.

Let Jake Barter Work on That for a While

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Now that I’ve assumed the persona of Jake Barter, my whole life has changed.  Jake Barter is no ordinary man.  At the very least he has the training of a double nought secret agent and the social connections of Bruce Wayne.  His resume is a combination of special forces operator and philosopher king.  And because of this I told Camera Girl that she needed to treat me with much greater respect and an almost religious awe.

I don’t think she “gets it” yet.  You know what they say about a prophet in his own country.  Well, that goes double for a pseudonymous author.  I think I may now begin to write the memoirs of Jake Barter in my spare time.  I think he will be a picaresque character who gets involved in serious situations like wars, revolutions and social movements and ends up causing things to go south in horribly predictable ways based on his sloth, greed and phenomenal incompetence.  His only redeeming qualities are monumental overconfidence, enormous likeability and unbelievable luck.  I’m thinking I’ll start him off as a special advisor to Trump on constitutional law and then take it from there.

But seriously, I am thinking about new characters for future stories and I think the next thing I do will have a strong humorous streak in it.  And this is because I do enjoy making fun of things I don’t like and combining that with a writing project should make it a lot of fun for me.  But what I must do is decide if it will be in the same “universe” as “The Sniper.”  So far there isn’t a lot of humor there and maybe it would be better to separate a new project from a place with so much trauma lurking around every turn.  And that’s fine.  Making up multiple fictional worlds allows the author to escape from any traps he’s gotten himself into in the old ones.  You can get tired of a scenario or you just need a break from figuring out how to keep your characters from either getting killed or solving all their problems.  After all, either of those paths ends the story.  So, you have to be constantly threading the needle to maintain the overall “problem” but still carve out a piece of plotline to make the present installment interesting.

I think I might want to do an extraterrestrial story.  I’ve played around with some short story / novella length things in the past but they just petered out.  I think this time I’ll try to storyboard a whole bunch of stuff first so I have a direction and enough plot lines and an overarching direction for the thing before I get really started.  And what is currently completely stymying me is deciding what kind of Earth this will be.  Will it be like the actual current day disaster we are living through or will it be some kind of “day after tomorrow” where we’ve gotten our act together and learned how to live like human beings.  Well, I’ll let Jake Barter work on that for a while.

Well, Spin the Wheel

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If a brutally long and tedious day starts and ends with good news, does that make it a good day? I would have to say yes. This morning started with the book cover for “The Sniper” arriving. And after returning from a long, grueling day trapped in the bowels of a drab New England city, bored almost to desperation, I finally have a deadline for the launch of my book. It will be out sometime between the middle and end of January. Now granted, that can be as much as two months from now but just putting a stake in the ground is what I need to coordinate the whole crazy flying circus of an effort. Covers and EPUB files and pdfs and key words and discount deals and reviews and project pages and pseudonyms and email lists and Amazon ads and heaven knows what else. Yes, a day that starts and ends well is a good day.
I was pleasantly surprised at just how accurately the cover art portrayed the scenario and the mood of the story. And the quality of the drawing exceeded my expectations completely. I’m extremely glad I went in the direction I did instead of a more generic cover. If for no one else than for myself. It makes the book real.


Now I have to confess that I have no idea whether what I’m trying to do makes any sense. Can a book from an unknown author with an extremely niche audience break out and find a generously sized audience? My rational engineering side says the odds against it are long. I’ll say one in a thousand.
But at the same time, a part of me is anxious to take the plunge. And that is exactly what I’m doing. It’s a roulette wheel spin with a big pot of my money plunked down on double zero. What could be more fun than that? Well, I guess winning would be more fun. But that’s well beyond my power to ensure. I’ll have to let fate have her say.
I guess now I know how every author since Homer has felt when his creation is about to be unveiled. And I’ll say it’s a good feeling. As Kipling said:
“When ’Omer smote ’is bloomin’ lyre,
He’d ’eard men sing by land an’ sea;
An’ what he thought ’e might require,
’E went an’ took — the same as me!”
Every teller of tales is part of the long tradition. You make up something in your head and you want to see if the audience resonates to the same vibration you felt. But the worst fate would not be if a lot of people didn’t like it. The worst is if no one ever hears it.
Achilles in the Iliad wanted to die for glory, for immortal fame. Well, I’d prefer to live but I’d forego any profit if I could guarantee that a million people read my story. That would be a form of immortality. Well, spin the wheel.

Plato Was a Dope

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The original utopia was Plato’s Republic.  And in that hypothesized city-state one of the most important precepts for producing good citizens was proper education.  Now, if you’ve ever read “The Republic” you know it’s literally gibberish.  Plato proceeds from unsubstantiated statements to illogical conclusions throughout the argument he uses to design his state but one thing I think he was right about is the necessity for highly superior education.  So, my republics will incorporate the most scientific and practical methods for educating and testing the young in order to maximize their future value as workers and citizens and to provide a worldview that would allow them to harmonize with their fellow citizens.

Now, since I am not an educator or a psychologist, I have no fixed ideas about methodology or even the content of this educational regimen.  I will hazard a guess that mathematics should still have a very important place in these schools.  I think thousands of years of western educational practices has proven the link between mathematical learning and general mental fitness.  But beyond that I’ll say that identifying the curricula for the various levels and types of schooling is something that will be of the highest importance for these communities.  And by no means do I intend for schooling to be strictly academic.  Specific vocational training is something I see as extremely valuable for individuals of all types.  Even a particle physicist or a concert pianist could benefit from knowing how to solder a component onto his computer motherboard or snake a bathtub drain.  But all of this is tangential to the main reasons why education will be critical to making these communities successful.

The schools will identify the academic capabilities of the children and combining this with their interests the correct academic and vocational curricula will be provided as choices.  This should maximize the probability for a successful citizen.  But the schools will also educate children with the ethos and expectations that the community is based on.  In this way the young will align themselves with the goals that are expected from them as members in the association.  In this way, the likelihood that these later generations will fit in with the community is maximized.

As with every other aspect of the community, feedback from the testing will inform the goals and needs of the community.  For instance, suppose the community is lacking in machinists.  So, the forecasting will be used to increase the monetary incentives for machinists.  And so forth for whatever other imbalances occur.

And education can also apply to other aspects of life.  For instance, men and women need to find mates in order to produce the next generation.  Education can include counseling on adapting to married life and even providing a dating service to locate compatible mates.

Now, Plato had his citizens indoctrinated with myths that justified their strange lifestyle.  For instance, he did not want the nuclear family to interfere with the loyalties of his citizens and so the children were raised together as a pack.  And he had stories that supposedly reinforced this lifestyle.  I wouldn’t expect these optimized communities of mine to attempt to destroy families.  On the contrary, I would expect them to do everything possible to prove that their lifestyle and community provide the best human environment possible.

I wonder what aspect of my optimal communities I’ll talk about next?  Well, maybe that’s enough for a while.  I better post on something else tomorrow.

photopia

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“It has been said that history repeats itself. This is perhaps not quite correct; it merely rhymes.”

Theodor Reik

 

When I think about what is going on in the world, I have to wonder whether the nonsense that we see all around us can go on forever.  Now it goes without saying that human folly is a tapestry that envelops all of us in a pattern that generates pain, fear, violence and death at a prodigious rate.  And that there has never been a full century in history when the majority of human beings lived in peace and happiness.

And this isn’t anything surprising.  This is just what human beings do.  We’ve always lived in a state of wary hostility even when we were nothing but small family groups living around a campfire to keep the cave bears and sabretooth tigers at bay.  We’re not peaceful creatures.  We may live now in enormous groupings measured in the millions and even billions of individuals but at all times and in all places, we seem to end up at each other’s throats.  But, does this have to be?  Could it be possible for humans to organize themselves into groups that interact in ways that lead to long term and abiding cohesion and satisfying cooperation?

The track record for utopian communities is definitely poor.  Some of the religious groups have thrived and shown some ability to cooperate in many community endeavors but this is a small minority of the human race.  And even they can’t completely eliminate anti-social behavior.  Currently, communities that live in affluent areas and support a robust police presence and a conservative judicial philosophy seem to do the best at creating a workable human environment.  But as we’ve seen since 2020 the forces of chaos can unleash barbarism even in the most affluent areas of the country.

But what if technology can provide a system to guarantee both social cohesion and material security?  We’re seeing the dystopic version of this in the Chinese system of social control called the “Social Credit System.”  Here those who don’t follow the rules are blacklisted and denied access to various important social advantages like good schools and better neighborhoods.  But think of the opposite.  Imagine a multitude of organizations that figure out ways to find compatible people and build social systems that bind them together and allow them to thrive.  I imagine these as completely voluntary associations.  And if someone doesn’t work out, they get the equity that they put into the system and are assisted to find another association where they would fit better.  But such an ejection would be considered a failure by the organization, which would use the most advanced research to analyze personalities before candidates are accepted into the association.

In the next installment I’ll discuss what facets of life would and wouldn’t be included in these organizations.  And I’ll talk about what I think are the human realities that make something like this extremely difficult to pull off outside of a science fiction story.

Too Soon for Cabin Fever

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Too many irons in the fire.  More and more “stuff” dumped in front of me to trip over.  Boredom, frustration, ennui, blah, blah, blah.  Okay, whatever.

So, I’m trying to concentrate on the important stuff.  I got my cover artist signed up.  He needs some information from me and I’m working to answer the questions.  I’m still waiting for some answers from the experts on small stuff and big stuff that has to be decided (when, how and how much).

And I’m looking to sell off a bunch of lenses I don’t use much and exchange them for that new 100mm f/2.8 macro lens from Sony.  It’ll be good to move out a bunch of stuff that’s just sitting around and concentrate on what I like to play around with.  I’ll probably also buy a macro rail and maybe some doo-dads that will let me experiment with tilt shift and other technical adjustments.  I was watching a video from a guy in England who does a lot of product work.  You know, pictures of corn flakes boxes and shampoo bottles.  He was demonstrating his technical camera.  It’s a digital “back” attached to a bellows with a lens on the other side attached to a support that allowed for all kinds of motion for the lens; tilt and shift and any kind of motion relative to the digital back.  In addition, the digital back can tilt and shift also.  This allows the image formed by the lens to strike the sensor either straight on or at any angle desired.  Now I think this is really great.  I’d love to have this capability.  But the numbers being thrown around for a medium format digital back and the other components runs into the tens of thousands of dollars (well, pounds for that Brit).

But it occurred to me that with a little ingenuity and a slight downgrade in kit (e.g., a full frame camera like my Sony A7IV instead of a medium format back) I might be able to get almost the same effects for very short money.  And since the winter is beginning to bite into my soul (we had the first noticeable snow cover this morning) this would be a marvelous time to distract myself from the realities of Dunwich in the winter.

Tuesday and Wednesday will be boring work days.  Saturday is another family party (great!).  A week from Tuesday will be a day of tedium not to be imagined and then Thursday is Thanksgiving.  I guess you must take the good with the bad.  But I’m not very patient.  Camera Girl is much better at that sort of thing.  She was raised to be hard-working and dependable.  I, on the other hand, am lazy, easily bored and unreliable.  I like to think this is because I am like my idol; Wiley Coyote, a super genius.  I like the way that sounds, WILEY COYOTE, SUPER GENIUS!!!!!!

I’d better cut this short.  It’s becoming too much like me talking to myself and that’s not healthy for anyone.  It’s too close to the scene where Wendy Torrance starts reading the manuscript that Jack has been working on and finds that it’s hundreds of pages of text that consists of variations on the sentence, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”  It’s just too early in the winter to start getting cabin fever.

Oh, Woe is Me

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My life is already getting hectic again.  I’m working on getting my book cover drawn and I think I’ve found the artist.  He’s a fellow in France and his drawings are very skillful and artistic.  Much better than I need but I think it makes sense to have a talented person handling something that I’m completely unqualified to do.  My concept is a black and white sketch of a sniper on a rooftop aiming down at an antifa riot where one rioter in black bloc is getting ready to knife a business owner trying to protect his storefront from the rioters.  It’s basically a scene from the book.

Of course, not being someone who can draw I don’t have a feel for the sense of perspective and how that would affect the relative sizes of the several figures in the scene.  That probably will dictate where the vantage point of the viewer should be.  But that’s why I want someone skilled working out those kinds of questions.

And suddenly there are all kinds of details I’m thinking about.  Is launching a book before, during or after the Christmas shopping season the best time for an independent author?  Should I explicitly sub-title the book as a series?  And what about my nom de plume?  I’ve come up with a few names and they seem to break into two groups; rugged or literary.  As an example, compare Jack Fader versus Julian Lesage.  So many details, so little attention span.

So I’m busy with all of this stuff but the day job is being super annoying just when I thought it would be giving me a break.  Oh, the pain, the pain.  And simultaneously, the family holidays are coming up so I have to help Camera Girl prepare for the festivities.  So, this week I’ve been cleaning up the yard and putting stuff away and winterproofing the vulnerable areas of the Compound.  And every year that list grows.  I noticed today that a small back gate to one of the fences was blown right off its hinges by a windstorm this week.  I knew it was weakened but I thought it would last a little while longer.  But now I’ve got to do something permanent about it.

And this morning I’m sitting with Camera Girl in the dining room and looking out on a screened in porch I see some kind of medium sized bird fluttering around in the porch.  The wind blew open the magnetized doorway of the curtain just long enough for the bird to find its way in but not long enough for it to escape so I had to go to its rescue.  I arranged for its escape but did I get even a thank you from the ungrateful avian?  Nope.  Not even a friendly chirp.  But going out there brought to my attention just how much dust and dirt had built up on the deck.  There are whole areas of this place that I don’t set foot in for seasons at a time.  I do live in a very strange and inefficient place.

Well, now that I’ve complained about the problems I’m surrounded by and shared them with you, I feel a little better.