So Tuesday night, the back of my mouth where the naval cavity meets the throat began to feel itchy. I could tell I was coming down with something.
My roommate diagnosed it as a sinus infection and prescribed, among other things, some super spicy Korean barbecue. If you’ve ever gone to Cup-Bop in Provo and ordered a ten, you know what I’m talking about. That stuff will melt your face off—or, in my case, rapidly evacuate the sinuses, denying that territory to the infection.
The next two days were pretty miserable. I got maybe an hour of sleep the first night, and woke up with a nasty sore throat, as well as a headache and stuffy nose. Had more Korean barbecue the next day, which did help with the sinuses but also ripped out my stomach lining and did a number on my digestive tract. That stuff is insane.
The worst is over, though, and I was back on my feet this morning. Which is remarkable, because this time last year, I had the same virus, and it knocked me out for a month. Literally. I was bedridden for three or four days, and confined to my apartment for another three weeks. Compared to that, two days of a nuked digestive tract combined with moderate flu symptoms isn’t so bad.
The moral of the story is that sometimes, the best way to fight a disease is to wage a scorched earth campaign on your own body. Also, do not underestimate the power of Korean barbecue.
I’ll be back next week. Hopefully my stomach lining will be back too.
As I mentioned in a previous post, I’ve been crunching the data from my last seven years of indie publishing, and it’s yielded some very interesting information. Here’s another graph that I managed to pull out:
This graph shows all of the monthly averages for royalties earned and units sold, across all my books, from 2012 to 2017 (excluding February 2017, which was an outlier due to having a book in a story bundle). I haven’t adjusted for anything else, such as new releases or total books out, so take it with a grain of salt.
One of the big assumptions and/or questions in the book world regards the existence of a “summer slump,” where books (depending on genre) don’t generally sell as well and people generally aren’t reading. Judging from the data and my own experience, there does appear to be a slump from August to October. However, there also appears to be a “midwinter slump” from February to April.
The interesting thing is that units sold don’t appear to dip all that much, for whatever reason. It’s just the royalties that are affected. And in December and January, readers appear to be willing to buy more expensive books, as the royalties go up by more than units sold.
From this, it appears that the prime time of the year for bookselling are November to January and May to July. Of course, bear in mind that this is only my anecdotal experience, and the plural of anecdote is not data.
If I had to hazard a guess as to what is going on, it would be that readers are tighter with their money in the months following the holidays, and that the summer doldrums do indeed tend to stifle their enthusiasm for books. Interestingly, though, there seems to be a spike in reading with the spring, perhaps as they come out of hibernation.
Of course, it’s also possible that my own enthusiasm for marketing and publishing is greatest in the spring and early summer, and tends to fall off with the winter cold and the summer heat.
Either way, my own data tend to suggest that yes, there is a summer slump.
The Broward County sheriff needs to resign or be fired immediately, and should also stand trial for criminal negligence. There’s something rotten in the state of Florida, and it all points back to this man.
CNN has completely lost all credibility. As far as I’m concerned, they rank slightly above Alex Jones and slightly below the grocery store tabloids for journalistic integrity.
The anti-gun activist shooting victims are political pawns. Nothing more, nothing less. Emotion does not give you credibility, and suffering does not give you authority.
By the same, Donald Trump’s emotional reactions on Twitter have been disappointingly puerile.
The only person who comes out looking good from all this is Dana Loesch.
We obviously have a problem with mass shootings in this country. Instead of focusing on the gun issue to the exclusion of everything else, we should first try to fix all of the other contributing factors, such as mental illness, school security, psychotropic drugs, absent fathers, etc. Let’s focus on the areas where we can agree.
The FBI has demonstrated criminal negligence in their failure to investigate the shooter, and what is even more disturbing, I don’t know that it isn’t politically motivated. If it is, it represents an existential threat to our republic.
I don’t know that our nation has been this politically divided since the years leading up to the Civil War. The United States is deeply ill, and if we cannot come together—if we cannot find our e pluribus unum—I fear that this great nation will fall.
For most of 2012, I lived in Georgia, a former Soviet Republic of the USSR. I came to know the people, the culture, and the politics of that part of the world first-hand. In particular, I was there for the 2012 elections, a watershed moment for modern Georgian politics.
Bidzina Ivanishvili, billionaire, founder of the Georgian Dream party, and prime minister from 2012 to 2013.
A little bit of background. Georgia won its independence in the 90s during the fall of the Soviet Union, and immediately fell itself into a civil war. Three regions broke off: Adjara in the south, South Ossetia in the north, and Abkhazia in the northwest. It was a very difficult time, where the national army was little more than a deputized gang of thugs.
Eduard Shevardnadze, former Soviet Politburo member and President of Georgia until 2005.
When the chaos settled down, the man in charge was Eduard Shevardnadze, a former high-ranking member of the Soviet Politburo. If you had to compare it to something, it would be like the United States falling apart and George W. Bush taking over Texas. An old establishment politician from a dynastic family returning to his newly independent home country to head it during troubled times.
Mikheil Saakashvili (Right), former president of Georgia. He came to power in the Soros-funded Rose Revolution, pushed for Georgia to join Nato, and fought a disastrous war with Russia in 2008. After he was ousted from power, he became a governor in Ukraine, following the Euromaidan Revolution that brought Ukraine into the Western orbit. American collusion, anyone?
But then, in 2005, something interesting happened: a “color revolution” broke out. George Soros, members and allies of the Bush Administration, and other foreign actors began to stir up protests in Tbilisi against Shevardnadze’s government. The tensions culminated with Mikheil Saakashvili and other agitators storming parliament with roses in their hands, taking over the podium and forcing Shevardnadze to flee with his bodyguards. He later resigned, and Saakashvili ran unopposed in the following election. He won by 96.2%.
The August 2008 war between Russia and Georgia. It began when Saakashvili ordered his forces to shell Tskhinvali in Russian-occupied South Ossetia, and ended with the total defeat of the Georgian armed forces, with Russia reinforcing and formally recognizing the separatist regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Many ethnic Georgians lost their lives or became internally displaced refugees within their own country.
It was political theater of the highest order, accomplished by collusion with a meddling foreign power. Once Saakashvili was in charge, Georgian foreign policy took a hard turn towards the West, causing massive tensions with Russia that culminated in the 2008 Russo-Georgian War.
This was a very bad move. Georgia is basically the Mexico of Russia; the two countries are closely linked both culturally and economically, with a large volume of remittances flowing from expatriots in Russia back to their families in Georgia. By turning so sharply to the West—not to mention, starting an actual war—Saakashvili did his people a great disservice.
Fast forward to 2012. I was teaching English in a village called Rokhi, about half an hour south of Kutaisi. I knew the basic outlines of this history, but very few of the specifics. The people were generally friendly to Americans, but they were very quiet about politics, at least to me.
Then the elections happened, and against all odds the Georgian Dream party completely overthrew Saakashvili’s ruling party in the parliament. Politicians started fleeing across the border into Turkey. Those who didn’t flee were arrested, sometimes on spurious charges, sometimes on legitimate ones. The courts became weaponized in a political struggle between Saakashvili and the Georgian Dream. It wasn’t a transfer of power so much as an ongoing coup.
All of a sudden, people starting speaking up and telling me what they really thought. While Saakashvili was in power, people were always careful around me because they assumed (since I was an American) that I was some sort of spy. But when the Georgian Dream Party took over, people felt it was safe to share their true feelings about how much they hated this guy who had taken over their country and driven it into the ground.
This is what foreign collusion and meddling looks like. America does it all the time. There’s a saying in the former Eastern Bloc that goes something like this:
“Why has there never been a color revolution in the United States?”
“Because there is no US embassy in the United States!”
Except now, I’m not so sure. Because the hyperbolic media response to the latest mass shooting in Florida shares some very disturbing similarities with a color revolution, and it frankly scares the hell out of me.
Take the CNN town hall that happened earlier this week. That wasn’t democracy in action, or even journalism. It was political theater, pure and simple. It was a political witch hunt and full-on push for gun confiscation.
A lot of things about the Florida shooting don’t add up. The alleged gunman managed to slip away with the fleeing students, instead of getting killed by law enforcement on the scene as is the pattern with most mass shootings. The FBI knew about this kid, had a file on him, knew what he was planning, and did nothing—absolutely nothing—to stop him. His classmates just happen to be pro-gun control activists, and they just happen to put together this massive national children’s crusade literally before the funerals for all the victims have been held.
Look, I’m not saying the kids are crisis actors. I’m not saying that what they went through isn’t absolutely horrific, or that they don’t have a right to feel the way that they do. What I’m saying is that the politicization of this shooting is massively suspicious and full of red flags.
Consider the three major mass shootings that happened last year, and the differences in the media’s response to each of them.
The first was the Congressional baseball shooting in June. A Bernie Sanders supporter tried to assassinate most of the Republican caucus by hunting them down at a baseball practice. It was deliberate, it was planned, and it very nearly threw this country into a major political crisis.
Within a week, the major news outlets were no longer covering the story.
The Las Vegas shooting was next, in October. A horrible tragedy and watershed moment for mass shootings in America. And yet, after all these months, there are so many unanswered questions. Where are the Casino tapes? Why haven’t we seen them? What was the involvement of the shooter’s girlfriend? Who is the other person of interest that the FBI hasn’t revealed? Was there a second shooter? What about all of the problems with the timeline?
None of these questions have gotten much airplay outside of alternative media. Also, the fact that the shooter was on mood-altering drugs hasn’t factored into the public debate nearly as much as the guns that he used—or didn’t. We don’t really know.
A month later, in November, we had the Sutherland Springs church shooting. The shooter was stopped by a bystander with a gun. A classic example of how the right to bear arms protects and makes us safer.
Once again, the mainstream media buried the story within a week.
Now we have the Florida shooting, with its own set of details that don’t quite add up. Far from burying the story, the mainstream media has blown it up to eleven, with nonstop political theater, witch hunts, appeals to emotion, and above all else, unyielding demands for a total confiscation and ban on all guns.
Who benefits from the politicization of mass shootings? The people who want to destroy the right to bear arms. Who is that? No one so much as the people who want to sow chaos in this country.
If the feds attempted a total gun confiscation, it would spark a second American civil war. Russia would benefit greatly from this. And if the confiscation were ultimately successful, it would leave us that much more vulnerable to a foreign takeover in the style of a color revolution.
This is the stuff of political thrillers, and it’s happening in realtime before our very eyes.
Who’s behind this? I don’t know. I have my suspicions, but I cannot yet say anything with any degree of certainty. But because certain factions benefit from the politicization of these mass shootings, I believe they will continue, and will probably increase in frequency.
We hear of wars in far countries, and say that there will soon be great wars in far countries, but do we know the hearts of the people in our own land?
Pay no attention to the people trying to make this movie all about race or politics or whatever. They’re all just agenda-driven media whores trying desperately to hijack whatever’s popular at the moment in order to remain culturally relevant. This movie has nothing to do with any of them.
I really enjoyed Black Panther. Good story, good characters, lots of fun action, and a couple of really interesting twists. The music was fantastic: two hours of woodwinds and African drums. It wasn’t as comedic as Thor: Ragnarok, but it didn’t take itself too seriously either. For a Marvel movie, it was also surprisingly family friendly.
I thought it did an excellent job of acknowledging race and politics without allowing itself to be taken over by either. It isn’t race that makes the people of Wakanda different from the rest of the world: it’s the magical meteorite that fell in their country, with thousands of years of isolation that allowed them to follow their own cultural path. As for politics, it’s not so much about the struggle against the colonizers as it is a question of how to open up to the rest of the world: peacefully, or violently.
Honestly, if you don’t care about race or politics, you don’t have to worry because it doesn’t beat those over your head at all.
The story is really solid, which is par for the course for Marvel. The world is also really well done. Very different from what you usually see in these kinds of superhero movies. In fact, it didn’t feel like any of the other Marvel movies, even though it hit all of Marvel’s usual high standards.
The thing I liked most about it was probably the characters. T’Chaka is a genuinely good person trying to set right the mistakes of his father, and the friends who surround him are also good people trying to do right by their own as well. But they don’t always agree on what’s best: whether to keep the magical kingdom of Wakanda secret and isolated, or whether and how to reach out to the rest of the world.
Overall, it was a really fun movie and I’d definitely recommend it. Like I said at the top, pay no attention to the attention whores on mainstream and social media trying to make this all about race and identity politics. Star Wars may have been taken overy by wankers, but Marvel has not.
This is the book that invented the self-help genre, and for good reason. It was written more than 80 years ago and still stands as the definitive work on the subject. Unless you live in a cabin in the mountains where you never interact with other people, this book really is as important and life-changing as everyone says it is.
I bought this book at the urging of a friend way back in 2015, but I kept putting off actually reading it until now. I’m not entirely sure why I did. Maybe the titles were too clickbaity, or the language read like something from a sensationalist blog. Truth is, though, that Carnegie was the one who invented that kind of writing and everyone else is just trying to imitate him. And unlike your typical internet clickbait, there is actually a lot of substance behind the words.
I can summarize this book in one sentance: “To win friends and influence people, build them up and make them feel important.” There really isn’t any secret to it. The difficult part is learning how to do it and mastering the technique, for which it may take a lifetime of practice. I’ve heard that many billionaires make it a point to reread this book on a yearly basis.
This book is especially helpful if you struggle with social skills in any way. That alone should make it a must-read for most of us geeks, especially me.
Weird things happen whenever I decide to practice the advice in this book. I complimented a man on his hat, and he offered to give it to me. I gave the TSA officer a smile, and he let me pass through security without confiscating my >3 oz container of homemade fruit preserves from my cousin’s wedding. I told the cashier at the Creamery that I liked her braids, and her expression went from “I’m having a horrible day” to cheerful and happy.
It’s honestly a little freaky how well this advice works. If I’d read this book back in 2015, I may have even convinced my parents not to vote the way that they did. I certainly would have toned down the politics on this blog, and would probably have persuaded a lot more of you to see things the way I see them in the process.
So yeah, unless you’re alone on an interstellar voyage light-years from the nearest human being, this book is a must-read. And even if you are on that voyage, if there’s so much as a single other person on that starship, you definitely need to read this book.
A week ago, I blogged about how writing every day may not be the best advice. I pointed out how following that advice had helped me when I was first starting out, but it had also hurt me later on. I pointed out how sometimes it’s better to work smarter than harder. After all, why throw out 80% of what you write if by taking a little time to properly outline things, you can write a clean first draft?
Well, I’ve been reading a book called The Compound Effect, and it’s made me rethink some of those ideas. The main point the book makes is that it isn’t the big things that make the most difference, but the small, regular things compounded over time.
Is it still a good idea to work smarter? Yes, definitely. If by taking the time to prewrite a book, you can avoid throwing out 80% of your work, then by all means that’s more important than hitting your 2k / 3k / 10k words for the day, or whatever. But here’s the thing: there’s a smarter way to write every day too, and it has to do with momentum.
If you’ve been in a writing rut, it’s very hard to go from 0 to your daily word count goal in a single day. Over time, that goal becomes a ceiling instead of a floor. It’s all very psychological. Your writing time fills up with procrastination or busywork, to the point where it takes all your energy just to hit that daily goal.
All of that changes if instead you say “I’m going to write 500 / 200 / whatever words more than I did the day before.” Even from a rut, it’s not that difficult to go from 0 to 500 in a single day. And once you’ve hit 500, it’s not difficult to hit 1k. Compounded this way, you can soon break through that ceiling and still have energy to hit everything else.
It’s an interesting approach to daily writing goals, one that I’m trying out right now. But for it to really work, you do have to write every day, otherwise the compounding never happens.
When I first started this blog back in 2007, I used to write a lot about momentum. I was very much a novice writer, but even back then I could feel how much easier it was to write when I was on a streak than when I was starting from zero—and a streak can start with a day of just a few hundred words.
The things to avoid are busywork and useless guilt. If your writing goals have become a ceiling that you just can’t break through, perhaps it’s time to recalibrate. Work smarter AND harder.
And now, for no particular reason at all, here’s a Sabaton music video.
When I started writing back in college, the prevailing advice was to write every day. And to be fair, at the time, that was very good advice. I was just getting started on my writing career and had a lot of learning to do. My writing improved by leaps and bounds as I strived to make progress on my WIPs every day.
Now, though, I’m not so sure that writing every day is the best thing to strive for.
It’s not that I’m against the idea of practice. Writing is one of those rare creative professions where people don’t think you get better the more you do it. Of course, that’s flat-out wrong. The best musicians put in hours and hours of practice, as do the best chess players, or the best soldiers, or the best sports stars. Writing is no different. If you don’t put in the time and effort, you won’t get the results.
At the same time, there’s a tendency among aspiring and even journeyman writers to become consumed with guilt because they missed their writing goal for the day. This is counterproductive. Goals don’t exist to give you satisfaction or guilt, but to give you direction. Satisfaction comes from what you achieve in pursuit of a goal, not in the goal itself.
So that’s one aspect of it. But there’s another aspect, and that’s how effective it is (or isn’t) to write every day.
Between high school and college, I worked as a gofer on a masonry crew. One of the things my boss used to say was “work smarter, not harder.” He often said it rather tongue-in-cheek, but it’s still an important concept. It doesn’t matter how hard you work if you’re doing it wrong.
This applies to writing as well. What does it matter that you write every day, if you’re just going to throw out most of it anyway? Is that really the best use of your time and energy? If by taking a week to establish things like plot, character, world-building, etc, you could write a much cleaner and better first draft, does it matter that you technically weren’t writing every day during that week?
Write smarter, not harder.
Now, I’m very glad that I did write every day back when I was starting out. My first (and possibly my second) million words were mostly crap, so it was better to put in the time and get through it as quickly as possible, just for the learning and growth.
But now that I’m an established journeyman writer, I find that the results are much better if I take the time to do some basic prewriting before I attack the first page. My first drafts are cleaner. The story comes together easier, with fewer problems. I don’t have to do “triage” revisions, where I’m throwing out characters, subplots, or even major plot points simply because they don’t work.
In Brandon Sanderson’s writing class, I once asked what I needed to change so that I could write my WIPs straight through without getting stuck in the middle. Brandon asked me if I was still finishing them, and when I said yes, he basically said don’t worry about it. That was good advice then, but it isn’t anymore. I’ve reached the point where writing smarter is more important than writing harder.
Anyway, those are my thoughts at the moment. Things change a lot when you’ve been writing for 10+ years, and unlike all the resources available for aspiring writers, there isn’t a whole lot of stuff out there to help guide you through the later phases. I’m basically figuring it out as I go.
This movie was fantastic. Every bit as good as the trailers make it out to be. A sight above Zero Dark Thirty, and on par with American Sniper. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s the best movie I see all year.
It’s really fascinating to see how combat forges bonds between people. At the beginning, right after ODA 595 gets dropped in Afghanistan, there’s a real sense of tension as they don’t know who they can trust. That clears up after a few good battles, and by the end, it’s totally gone.
There’s also a really euphoric sense of victory that can be hard to find in Hollywood war movies. It’s easy to find movies that say “war is horrible,” and this one certainly says that as well, but it can be difficult to find a movie that portrays American forces as righteous leaders and unambiguous heroes. This one certainly does, without hamming it up or going over the top in any way, because these men really are heroes.
And the scale of the victory… I mean, Saving Private Ryan was a great movie, but the victory was less about the war and more about saving a single man. Zero Dark Thirty was about killing Osama Bin Laden, but there wasn’t a whole lot of actual combat. Hacksaw Ridge was a tremendous story about the heroism of one man, but the scope was still limited to the island of Okinawa.
In contrast, the scope of 12 Strong was the entire Taliban, and the War of Afghanistan itself. To this day, the victory marks Al Qaeda’s greatest defeat. Besides all that, there’s something awesomely badass about leading an outnumbered cavalry charge against tanks, rockets, RPGs, and truck monted machine guns, and winning.
Awesome movie. Though I have to say, I think there’s a bug on Rotten Tomatoes, because they have the scores for 12 Strong and The Last Jedi switched. In any case, this is definitely a war movie worth seeing.
Pay no attention to the people trying to make this movie all about race or politics or whatever. They’re all just agenda-driven media whores trying desperately to hijack whatever’s popular at the moment in order to remain culturally relevant. This movie has nothing to do with any of them.