Putting the finishing touches on a third book before posting to Amazon. I’ll do the same with the fourth book. After that I doubt I’ll write anymore. It seems the only way for people to read them is to advertise and I hate advertising with a passion. So they’ll just sit in a sea of a gazillion books never to be found and probably purged one day for lack of sales, I guess.
You?
It’s my first time writing a story since I was in school. And since I didn’t do well in school, it’s been a bit of a challenge to just believe that I should continue this hobby. But I desire to prove to my old self that I am capable of doing things that I want to do, regardless of how I did in writing or other subjects back then. I want to do it… so why not?
I had an idea for a novella last year and started messing around with generative AI to come up with some world building, and theme ideas. I thought I knew what it was going to be founded on, but as the months went by, I seemed to be second guessing myself of the direction and themes it would entail. That being said, I had worked on it and got the first zero draft scene worked out.
I’m very much pulling from several personal intrigues and world worries for this story. That being said, my first encompassing idea for the story was a biopunk, fantasy light story about a deranged scientist who starts a bio-terrorist movement with the goal of reshaping the world and those that govern it. I wanted to incorporate some climate fiction into it as a driving force for the deranged scientist. But as the list of things I wanted to incorporate into the story grew, I started to become overwhelmed with what the story would take to finish.
There is still a desire to write it but I know that it’s going to take a long time for me to finish the first draft.
If you are enjoying it and it’s a goal for you don’t give up! Keep going.
I’m not even certain I will give up. I find the act of writing therapeutic at times.
Originally I really enjoyed it and was hoping I could make something of it. This was in the infancy of the internet and I submitted stories to publishers and had lots of rejections. It was easy to believe my own stories were good and my prose compelling but I was obviously biased. So what I did was type up maybe four stories that had been published and threw mine in with them, all anonymously. I asked friends and family to read them and tell me which one they liked best. I didn’t stop trying until they picked my stories. This made me feel like maybe I was good enough.
But due to the rejections, I kind of gave up. Years later I picked up a book I had started and read through it. I decided even if it’s a complete disaster I’m going to finish it because I want to check it off my bucket list that I had actually written a book.
By then Amazon existed so I didn’t need to actually get it approved by a publisher. They’ll publish any old crap. LOL. At first people were buying it and I got a few reviews and they were all positive. I sold about 50 copies in maybe a few months but after 90 days it dropped off of the “new” list and just stopped selling. That was my first book, started when I was pretty immature. I think I got better.
So the second book I think was MUCH better. I wrote it much quicker so it was more coherent and I was really excited. But things had changed at Amazon and I’m not even sure if there is a category for “new in the last 30 days, 60 days, 90 days,” anymore. Anyway, it wound up selling two copies in the first month and I want to say two more copies since. My grand total for both books is something like 63 sales in maybe 10 years.
But in between then and becoming disillusioned I wrote two more books. I have an editor (not her real job) and she really loves my books but she struggled to get the third one back to me because she didn’t like the ending. I asked her to make a suggestion. Of all my friends and family that read it they are about 50/50 on the ending. I guess my editor didn’t feel comfortable giving suggestions, just an opinion. So it languished for a couple of years.
The last one was a bit different for me and she absolutely loved it and got it back to me right away. So now I’m just running through them both to get them ready and waiting for cover art. Then I’ll put them up and walk away unless some brilliant new idea comes to me and I can’t resist it. Time will tell.
I have a passion for helping people find and connect with the right resources and services for whatever they’re working on or doing. So you have me looking at your comment in three different ways.
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What online services are there that would be most suitable for your situation?
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It sounds like this was more of a hobby than a desire to publish and see some success. How do you feel about this?
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Intrigue. What is your book series about?
You are pretty much correct on that. But I believe that with very few exceptions writers want to be read, otherwise why would they write? So would I love for one of my books to be a bestseller? Hell yeah. Am I too lazy to work for that dream? Also yeah. You see I don’t need the money so I don’t see myself putting in what I believe would be a monumental effort to succeed, possibly only to fail anyway. I chatted with a guy on Goodreads who had had some success. If I remember correctly he had published over 30 things and even won some awards but couldn’t really make a living at it. I think this is a far more likely outcome than a bestseller. So I’m ok with not being the next Steven King. But I do long for more than 4 sales.
In fact, I set a rule for myself, that if a book had 1000 sales, I would pay for some marketing and put it in audio format. You see my sister has not read my books because she has some eye problems that makes it difficult for her to read, but she devours audio books.
I don’t actually care for series, which seems to be the way things are now. I find that by the time a series gets old it has strayed so far from what I liked in the first book that I’m no longer interested but at the same time I don’t want to read the same old, same old. I don’t think I really care for anything beyond about a trilogy.
So my books are all stand alone sci-fi stories.
Book 1 is about a salvage ship that answers a distress call and has a really bad time with the military ship controlling the area.
Book 2 is about colonists settling down on a new utopian planet and suddenly encountering some issues with the local wildlife. Issues that could effect the entire human race.
Book 3 is essentially about human trafficking in space. People looking for legitimate employment, are pressed into service breaking space ships that have reached the end of service.
Book 4 is a love story between a white collar crime investigator and a world class genetic engineer. It takes place with the backdrop of a very secretive alien race that has taken up residence in our asteroid belt to harvest the riches of an ateroid to trade with earth.
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Short story about 2 decomposing bodies. Kind of sexualizing decomposition.
Completely factually inaccurate but I think the concept is solid and so long as the execution is good enough, it might just be OK.
I don’t know when I’ll finish it but I’ve been working on an alternate history work inspired by this book the atlantropa articles. I’m going for a 5 mini stories in one universe thing.
In the long term, I’ve been mulling over an idea for my science fiction universe that the human colonization of cislunar space requires increasing social complexity as there is no longer a single means of survival to deny others like there is presently with wealth. Heat budgets and elemental cycles cannot be consolidated into a single form of currency with the buffer of the environment to anonymously tax the world.
Along these lines I’ve been asking myself how would this alter the perception of capitalism. This thought lead to my hypothesis that capitalism would be viewed allegorically as a religion where an atheistic perspective allows a satirist to critique the present.
as there is no longer a single means of survival to deny others like there is presently with wealth.
Oxygen on a spacecraft or space station would be your number one commodity to control. Water second and food third.
You would not last very long term like that. To be sustainable in space all elemental cycles are directly monitored and critical. Nothing is anonymous or unimportant. Heat is actually the most critical resource in space at scale if you want to keep living. Heat is the most difficult waste product to deal with because there is no differential to exploit and radiating into space is not very efficient.
This goes into several other aspects of my story and where I think the future is headed. I believe planets are prisons and not where humanity will colonize or travel to in the future. Gravitational differentiation of heavy elements is resource scarcity hell and escaping gravity well prisons is unsustainable. Almost all resources we currently use have total effective reserves less than 100k years at most. The only reason Earth has this level of resources is due to tectonic activity which is likely due to the Theia collision. We’re not going to find another planet with the same combo as earth within 20 parsecs… I could go on and on. Once we effectively access a m-type astroid it will completely change the meaning of wealth and kickstart the colonization of places like cislunar space. A single planetesimal core based m-type astroid can easily dwarf all the resources humans have ever had access to on the surface of Earth.
Life stabilizes at in the most efficient configuration. The waste of the present is nowhere near the most efficient state, and it has lead to a lot of looming problems. The only thing holding us back from O’Neill cylinders in cislunar space right now is total accessible wealth. Once we have such structures in cislunar space, it becomes much easier to access many other resources that are even further away from gravity prisons. I strongly believe we will do everything possible to avoid the heavy costs of planets and in so doing we will learn to manage the complexity required to survive. This increasing complexity management and pursuit of efficiency mimics nature and it is the only way we have a chance to last for millions of years.
I have a little blog where I post oddball essays when the spirit moves me. In the discussions of the recent healthcare CEO shooting, I’ve seen a lot of vague references to the amount of people Brian Thompson hurt. But usually it’s just referred to as “thousands” or similar. I wanted to take a crack at actually calculating a specific number. And I put together a little analysis here:
https://forestreflections.substack.com/p/mene-mene-tekel-upharsin
It’s not a perfect analysis, but I listed all my sources and assumptions. For some reason, I was inspired to take a particularly old school, fire-and-brimstone framing of the subject. I’m agnostic myself, but sometimes I’m drawn to this type of framing.
