Summer is a time when book sales typically slow down, at least for anything that’s not a beach read. To combat slow sales, many authors have found that it helps to schedule more book releases.
I’m definitely seeing the summer slump in my own sales numbers, but I also happen to have a bunch of unpublished short stories lying around, as well as a published one where the publishing rights revert in September. In fact, I’ve got enough short stories that I can publish one every three weeks from now to the end of summer.
So that’s what I’m going to do. And in order to have enough content for next summer, I’m going to spend the next couple of weeks after finishing Gunslinger to the Stars to write seven or eight new stories. I set a goal a few months ago to write a couple of short stories every month, but I’ve found that it’s very difficult to do that when I have a long-form WIP. Taking a break to pound out a few short stories seems like a much better way to write them.
Here is the release schedule:
JULY 24 – “Utahraptors at Dawn”
AUGUST 14 – “Welcome to Condescension”
SEPTEMBER 4 – “The Open Source Time Machine”
SEPTEMBER 25 – “L’enfer, c’est la Solitude”
If you’re subscribed to my newsletter, I do plan to do free giveaways with all of these stories eventually. However, I’m releasing them all at only 99¢ each, and it helps a lot when you read and review them right as they come out. Either way, I appreciate the support.
Also, I’m not sure how this slipped past me, but my short story “The Curse of the Lifewalker” is now available on the Sci Phi Journal! It’s behind a paywall, but you can read the first 20% or so for free. The publishing rights revert back to me next June, so it will be another year before I can indie publish it. In the meantime, the Sci Phi Journal is a great magazine, and you should definitely check them out!
Also, “A Hill On Which To Die” is coming out in a print anthology with Bards and Sages Publishing in the next couple of months! I’ll be sure to let you know when that’s available for purchase.
I’m working on the cover art for “Utahraptors at Dawn,” so I’ll be sure to do a cover reveal in the next couple of days. It’s going to be as fantastically awesome as the title suggests.
The American Insurgency officially broke out in 2026, as a direct result of Steward vs. The State of California which effectively nullified the 2nd amendment. However, the conflict was rooted in the politics of the previous decade, and the economic realities of the Great Collapse.
Following the election of 2016, the Republican Party split into various regional factions and ceased to be a force in American politics. None of the third parties then extant were able to pick up enough Republican dissenters to challenge the Democrats on the national stage. As a result, the 2018 elections handed the Democrats control of the House and Senate, as well as the White House.
The Great Collapse began in late 2016 / early 2017, when Germany and France fell into recession. The migrant crisis in Europe had reached the high water mark, which along with the ongoing Eurozone crisis propelled several right-wing, Euroskeptic parties into power. Referendums in Poland, Hungary, the Netherlands, Greece, and the Czech Republic all resulted in decisions to exit the EU, leading effectively to the dissolution of the union.
Following Vladimir Putin’s mysterious disappearance in April 2018, the Russian Federation collapsed and Russia ceased to exist as a single contiguous country. NATO attempted to safeguard Russia’s nuclear weapons arsenal and oversee a transitional government, but failed as the Russian oblasts either refused to recognize the authority of the Kremlin or were annexed by neighboring states. Poland and the V4 countries formed a competing alliance system for eastern Europe, and the various western European countries gradually withdrew support from NATO as they rebuilt their own national militaries.
As a result of these events, the entire Eurasian continent fell into economic collapse. Insurrections in the Chinese mainland forced the PRC to withdraw from global affairs as the country gradually imploded. Foreign investors lost a tremendous amount of capital. Stock markets across the globe plummeted, the Euro was disbanded, and regional wars broke out in the Balkans, the Caucasus, the Levant, and the South China Sea.
The immediate effect of all this was to drive foreign capital to the United States, which was not nearly as leveraged as the Eurasian countries and therefore in a much better economic position. However, the debt to GDP ratio of the United States was already over 100%, and US dollar’s days as the reserve currency of the world were numbered.
But in the short-term, the United States experienced a brief period of economic relief as the rest of the world collapsed. This boosted President Clinton’s popularity and enabled the Democrats to sweep the 2018 elections.
As soon as the Democrats had control of congress and the white house, they pushed a deeply partisan agenda. Abortion laws across the states were nullified by federal law. The federal minimum wage was raised first to $15, then to $20 as the dollar began to plummet. The welfare rolls expanded massively. Hate speech laws were passed that banned any discussion of abstinence in public schools, and mandatory consent classes began as early as grade 5. Christian churches were forced to perform gay marriages, and the movement to decriminalize pedophilia gained significant legal traction.
President Clinton was impeached and thrown out of office in 2021, but the damage had already been done. The Supreme Court was stacked with left-leaning activist judges, who overturned previous limits on federal powers and reinterpreted the US Constitution in ways that effectively nullified it. The rule of law had already broken down with the FBI’s failure to prosecute Clinton in 2016, but new court decisions effectively paved the way for the President to exercise dictatorial powers.
When the Supreme Court ruled in 2026 that the 2nd amendment was not to be construed as an individual right to bear arms, Washington immediately instituted a national mandatory gun buy-back program. Conservatives and libertarians decided they had had enough.
The 4th of July was kind of crazy for me. Sold fireworks for twelve hours, then put on a fantastic show at the house of my friend and cowriter, Scott Bascom. But yeah, it was pretty exhausting.
However, I found time over the weekend to publish a short story. This is one I wrote two years ago as part of the Short Blitz challenge, and blogged about it here.
Well, it’s available now for your reading pleasure!
Happiness is always a choice. Always. So is taking offense. No exceptions.
Anyone who says otherwise does not want you to be an empowered, liberated human being. They are teaching you to believe that you are a powerless victim, unable to control your own destiny.
There are only two classes of things in this world: things that act, and things that are acted upon. Empowerment is when you give somebody the ability to act for themselves, independent of outside forces. Disempowerment is when you take that ability away.
There is nothing more empowering than to realize that no matter where you are in life—no matter how shitty your circumstances—you can always still choose to be happy.
Happiness is a feeling that only exists inside of you. It is not something external that is forced or bestowed upon you by outside forces. It is wholly internal to your heart and mind. It is a reaction to outside forces—a reaction that you choose to make.
If happiness is not a choice—if it is something over which we have no control—then we cannot have any control over any of our feelings. Our passions are external forces that act upon us, and we are powerless to stop them because our emotional development ended at age two.
Is there anything empowering or liberating about this philosophy? No. Quite the opposite. It debases mankind and makes us no better than the animals. It destroys our agency and makes us slaves to our passions.
Happiness is always a choice.
In a similar way, it is always a choice to feel offended. Why? Because offense is a reaction to external forces, just as our feelings are reactions to external forces. If we cannot choose how we react to the things that happen to us, then we have no agency—no power to act for ourselves.
If taking offense is not a choice, then we are always at the mercy of those who offend us. Forgiveness is impossible because we are powerless to react in any other way. We are, and always will be, victims.
Does this mean that if someone hurts us, it is our fault for feeling hurt? No, because there is a difference between being hurt and taking offense. Hurt is a result of external forces, while offense is an internal reaction to those forces. It is impossible to love someone without giving them the power to hurt you, but how you respond to that hurt is always your choice.
In politics today, there is an increasingly popular idea that being a victim somehow makes you virtuous. This is where intersectionality comes from: so that people can claim to belong to two or three victim groups at the same time. It grows out of the idea that fairness is equality of outcome, and it is completely anathema to the idea of personal responsibility.
What does “responsibility” mean? It comes from two words: “able” and “response.” When you are responsible, you are able to choose your own response to the things that happen to you. You are an empowered free agent, a liberated human being.
Can you see how the modern cult of victimhood completely undermines this? How things like safe spaces, trigger warnings, and microaggressions are all calculated to destroy our individual agency, and thus render us powerless to control our own destiny?
The flipside of the coin of Liberty is personal responsibility. Anything that erases the latter will destroy the former with it, and those who give up their responsibilities also give up their freedom. When we surrender our ability to choose our own response, we are no longer people who act but people who are acted upon.
I really like your books. I think they are well-written and I enjoyed reading them. (So far, so good, right? Hang on.) However, I have returned them all because you priced them at $0.99 to $2.99, and that is too much to pay for them. I can’t afford to pay that much for a book, even though I liked it. In the future, can you make sure you make all your books free so I don’t have to return them?
Dear Ms. Reader,
Thank you for reading my books. I appreciate your patronage. However, this is why my books are not all free:
If you had lived in Germany before the Nazis came to power and a time traveler had told you how history would play out, what would you have done about it?
The nation was reeling from a massive economic depression after a decade of war exhaustion. In this troubled time, a charismatic democratic socialist ran on a platform promising to share the wealth of the top 1% (the Jews) with the rest of the nation. Violent protesters routinely disrupted his opponents’ political rallies. People in general were fed up with the political system and were eager for a change.
Obviously, there isn’t a 1:1 parallel between 1930s Germany and 2010s United States. But let’s take a quick look at some of the policies that the Nazis successfully championed:
Nationalized healthcare
Centralized education
Taxpayer subsidized abortion
Government mass surveillance
Arbitrary limits on free speech
And finally:
Abolition of private gun ownership
Can you see the chilling parallels between what the Nazis did and the agenda that the Left has been pushing for the last eight years?
Right now, the United States is reeling from the deadliest mass shooting in our nation’s history. The perpetrator was a domestic terrorist who pledged allegiance to ISIS, just like the last mass shooting which happened in San Bernardino. But instead of focusing on the radical Islamic ideology that motivated these shootings, the national discourse is focused on gun control.
This is patently ridiculous.
When a teenager commits suicide because of online bullying, is the solution to censor the internet?
When people spread lies and false rumors on social media, is the solution to place general restrictions on the use of social media?
When a battered wife is stabbed to death with a kitchen knife, do we call for regulations on the length and sharpness of all kitchen knives?
When large numbers of people die in car accidents, do we enforce a ban on “high-capacity” cars that can drive faster than 45 mph?
Better yet, do we allow car owners to sue the manufacturer if they ever get into an accident? Correct me if I’m wrong, but that wasn’t in the terms of the last government bail out.
We’ve had this debate over gun control many times before. Whenever we have a mass shooting in this country, the bodies of the victims are not yet cold before all of the old arguments on both sides are trotted out. So let’s go to the moment when the emotions were hottest, in 2012 after the tragic shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary:
In an interview with Dave Rubin, Ben Shapiro later said that Piers Morgan had actually brought one of the kids from Sandy Hook onto the set to come on in the second segment of the show. The kid was in a wheelchair, and Piers was going to use him as political prop to make a cheap appeal to emotion. Of course, after Ben called him out for standing on the graves of children, Piers’s whole debate strategy fell apart.
This is my response, which is currently the top comment on YouTube:
“Do you genuinely believe that your own government is going to turn on you in a way that you require an AR-15 to challenge them?”
Holy flying fuck, Piers Morgan. Do you have no self-awareness at all? You are talking to a Jew, Piers. A JEW. As in, one of those people who were systematically exterminated by a tyrannical regime called the Democratic Soc—sorry, the NATIONAL Socialist German Worker’s Party. Also known as the Nazis, Piers. The Nazis.
You are familiar with the Nazis, are you not, Piers? You know: the smartly dressed German guys with the swastika flags who bombed your homeland relentlessly for 3+ months back in 1940. If I remember my history correctly, you fought something of a war with them, did you not? Or are you as bad at history as you are at US constitutional law?
People like you are the reason I need an AR-15, Piers. Crybullies like you in the mainstream media who stand on the graves of children as they browbeat the rest of us into giving up our rights and liberty, all in the name of leftist ideology.
And you know what, Piers? When I do get an AR-15, I’m going to name it in your honor. I’m dead serious, Piers. I’m going to etch your name right on the barrel. I’ll keep it right next to François, my Mossberg shotgun (which I named in honor of another anti-gun wanker).
And you know what sound it’s gonna make when I fire it, Piers? That “ratatatat” when I pull the trigger?
That’s the sound of Liberty.
Here is why you need a gun:
When the founding fathers drafted the Constitution, they envisioned a political system unlike any other in existence at the time—one where the government exists only by the consent of the governed. This, they rightly believed, was the way to ensure Liberty.
In order for the system to work, however, the people had to be able to live without fear of the State. In other words, the government had to fear the people instead of the other way around.
The Declaration of Independence had already set the precedent that it was the right of the people to overthrow their government if it ever became tyrannical. The only way for that to happen was for the people to have the right to bear arms.
This is why the second amendment is the second amendment, not the ninth or the sixteenth or the twenty-eighth. It’s also why the second amendment never specified what kinds of arms should be allowed. The idea that founders’ original intent was to restrict gun ownership to muskets is patently ridiculous:
In my experience, people who favor stricter gun control laws generally fall into one of two camps: those who are simply afraid of guns, and those who want to vastly expand the powers of the State.
The first camp of people are generally well-meaning, if a little bit sheltered. Most of them have probably never owned or fired a gun of any kind. Their arguments for stricter gun control tend to be rooted in emotion. When a mass shooting happens, they feel like they need to do something to prevent this kind of massacre from ever happening again.
Unfortunately, these people have been spoon-fed lies from the second camp, which wants to disarm the general public NOT to reduce gun violence, but to vastly expand the powers of the state.
These people are fundamentally opposed to the idea of a government that exists only by the consent of the governed. They want to tear down the Constitution because it prevents them from using the power of the State to advance their political agenda. The principle of Liberty is a roadblock to them, and they want to abolish at every turn, not only with the second amendment, but the first, the fourth, the ninth, etc.
One of their main arguments is that there is no place in this country for private ownership of “assault rifles.” The argument is that these are “weapons of war,” and that therefore they have no place in civilian life.
To someone who has never owned or fired a gun, this is a pretty convincing argument. The term “assault rifle” is never clearly defined, but it effectively conjures up all the fears of guns and gun violence that many of these people have. To push the envelope even further, gun control advocates always associate “assault rifle” with AR-15, the most popular rifle in the United States.
The AR-15 is a de-clawed version of the M-16, which (unlike the AR-15) is fully automatic. That means that with an AR-15, you only get one bullet for every time you pull the trigger. AR-15s are most often chambered in .223/556, a round that is smaller in diameter than the most common handgun rounds. The reason it’s a popular weapons system is because it’s the Mr. Potato-head of guns: you can swap out basically all of the moving parts, or build one from scratch. No matter your needs (hunting, home defense, recreation, competition), you can adjust an AR-15 to meet them.
It’s actually not a scary gun at all, if you know how to use it properly. And judging from how many of them are circulating in the market, responsible gun ownership is the rule, not the exception.
Is the AR-15 a “weapon of war,” though? It can be if you want it to be. That’s kind of the point. Remember, one of the reasons for the second amendment was to enable the people to stand up against a tyrannical government. Without the right to bear arms—broadly defined—you cannot have Liberty.
This is where we get back to the Nazis. There is a reason why totalitarian governments always ban private gun ownership before they commit their worst atrocities. In the words of Mao Zedong, “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” When the guns are in the hands of the people, the people have political power and influence over their government. When they lose their guns, they lose that power.
But Joe, do you really fear an American holocaust? Do you genuinely fear that your government is going to turn on you in a way that you require an AR-15 to challenge them?
Yes, I do.
We tend to have this idea that the Holocaust was a historical aberration, a nasty horrible thing that never happened before and has never happened since. That simply is not true. Systematic interment and murder by tyrannical governments is actually the norm throughout history. The only thing that made the Holocaust any different was German efficiency.
Look at the sack of Carthage by the Romans. Look at the destruction of Baghdad by the Mongols. Look at all five times that Jerusalem was destroyed. In our modern era, look at the excesses of the French Revolution, the genocide of the Armenians, the British concentration camps in South Africa—indeed, look at the concentration camps IN THE UNITED STATES that were set up by FDR. Even before that, we had our own horrors like the Indian Removal Act and the Cherokee Trail of Tears.
And lest you think the world learned its lesson after Auschwitz and Dachau, read up on the Soviet Gulag and Chinese organ harvesting of political prisoners. There is a reason why the wait time for a kidney transplant in China is so ridiculously low.
The flipside of the coin of liberty is responsibility. In order for a people to be free, they need to take the responsibility of governing themselves. Part of that responsibility is learning how to defend yourself, not only from criminals, but from an overreaching, tyrannical government.
That is why you need a gun: because there is no Liberty without the means to defend it. That is also why I bought my first gun this past week (François) and why I’m building an AR-15 (Piers). Whenever there is a systematic effort to take away your fundamental rights, it becomes your duty to exercise those rights before they get taken away.
It has been more than a week since I’ve posted here, which is a bit surprising. Then again, I did decide to take a short break from writing, which pushed blogging a little further down the priority tree. The much higher priority has been finishing my friend’s basement before his wife has a baby next week (they’re inducing labor on the 14th). Twelve-hour workday sure are brutal.
In any event, I’ve been reflecting a lot on the craziness of politics these days, and the role of social media in that craziness. Without getting too deep into Trump vs. Clinton vs. Bernie, it seems sometimes that the supporters for each candidate are living in entirely different worlds.
Perhaps that’s because they are.
According to Pew Research, three out of five Americans get their news from social networking sites, with one out of five getting their news from social media often. For Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter, the majority of users get their news from the site.
Do Twitter and Facebook have a right to be politically partisan? Yes. They are private businesses, and as such should be allowed to participate in politics just like any other business (of course there are issues when they lie about being politically agnostic, but that’s a different issue).
The problem is that people have come to rely on social media so much that it completely warps the reality that they live in.
Every online community is, to a greater or lesser extent, an echo chamber that amplifies the viewpoints that the members tend to agree on and suppresses the viewpoints where most of the members disagree. This is why we have Godwin’s Law: because intellectual laziness is easy when everyone thinks you’re right. As online communities grow, the culture becomes even more self-sorting, developing complex narratives to reaffirm and reinforce the rightness of the group.
Essentially, humans are tribal, and the trend is for online communities to be more tribal, not less. Social media accelerates this trend by enabling users to fine-tune their tribes, blocking out any uncomfortable or dissenting viewpoints and creating a “safe space” where the user’s core beliefs are continually reinforced.
When people spend more time with their carefully curated online tribes than they do with people in the real world, the online reality becomes their reality. Instead of facing uncomfortable truths about the way the world actually works, they craft their own worlds where they don’t have to be responsible for their own actions, and their beliefs are always correct, even when they’re based on a failed ideology.
(As a side note, this is why gaslighting is such a big thing nowadays: it’s the art of crafting someone else’s online reality, without them realizing what’s happening. It’s a tactic that we see very often in today’s online politic debates.)
So what happens when one of these social media junkies comes out of their online echo chambers?
Whatever your position on LGBTQ issues, you have to admit that Steven Crowder absolutely destroyed Zack Ford in that debate. It wasn’t even close. The Twitter warrior was woefully unprepared to answer even the most basic criticisms of his underlying assumptions, and seemed frankly shocked that those assumptions were under debate.
This is what happens when you live in a virtual world. When you can simply block or unfollow any viewpoint that’s inconvenient to your preferred narrative, then the narrative becomes your only truth, no matter how false it actually is.
In its extreme form, it’s just as scary as the worst propaganda of the 20th century. In fact, it’s even more scary, because we’re doing it to ourselves.
I feel like I’ve got a unique perspective on this issue because, for most of the last year, I’ve been living without social media. I deleted my Facebook back in 2014, and disengaged from Twitter back in March.
(Since then, I have gone back to Facebook in a limited way, only because there’s a particular church group where the only way to keep up with events is to be part of the Facebook group. But I’ve only friended family and close friends and liked only a couple of political pages, and even then, I’ve felt the pull. When I’m no longer a part of this church group, I will delete my Facebook again and leave the site for good.)
Life is a lot different without social media. It’s a lot less stressful, a lot more satisfying. I get out more. I have deeper and more meaningful conversations with my friends. I no longer feel like I’m perpetually caught up in imbecilic arguments with twats and idiots. I feel a lot more free to pursue constructive things, like my writing.
At the same time, it really does feel sometimes that I went to sleep ten years ago and woke up in a different world. It’s like everyone else is crazy, and I’m the only sane one (until I discovered Ben Shapiro). I’m not sure how much of that has to do with leaving social media, since I only did that recently. Perhaps it was only by leaving social media that I realized how much everything outside of that echo chamber had changed.
I’m actually a lot happier without social media than I was with it. At the same time, I feel a lot less connected with what’s going on in my country right now. But is that only an illusion? Is it kind of like how you always feel like your writing sucks just as it starts to get better?
Whatever the case, I do know that if I were more active on social media, I would definitely be the guy that offends everyone with my political views, including a lot of potential readers. I suppose I could roll with it like Larry Correia, but I’m not quite passionate enough about politics to make that my shtick.
Though with the way things are shaping up politically, I may do a fisking or two on my blog. On that note, I’ll leave you with Ben Shapiro bringing some sanity to the news cycle:
The first thing most people think of is the zombie apocalypse. Which makes sense, considering how popular zombie stories are. The signs of collapse are clear and present, with no room for ambiguity. The world has come to an end, and the only thing left is to pick up an improvised weapon and fight.
In the real world, though, collapses are almost never so black and white.
When the housing market collapsed in 2008 and brought down the global economy with it, I was in college. With panicked capital looking desperately for a place to go, gas prices spiked to over $4 a gallon during the height of the summer. Then, as credit markets completely fell apart, retailers were forced to sell at rock-bottom prices just to keep their cash flow problems from driving them into bankruptcy.
So what did that look like? For me, an extremely expensive road trip back out to Utah, followed by a spending spree. I bought a really nice corduroy sports jacket for $15, and thought “hey, I could live with this recession.” Two years later, I was singing a very different tune.
In any collapse, people’s experience of the collapse varies wildly. Take the Euro crisis, for example. A couple of years ago, the Germans I chatted with online dismissed any claim that the EU was on the verge of falling apart. Now, the UK is holding a referendum on exiting the union, and no one really knows which way it’s going to go. Germany has not (yet) experienced the kind of depression-level unemployment that many of the southern countries have. To the middle-class government worker in Athens who lost all their savings in the recession and hasn’t been getting a paycheck for years, the German narrative of Greek laziness as the root cause of the crisis does not conform to reality.
When Ernest Hemmingway was asked how he went bankrupt, his answer was “gradually, then suddenly.” The same can be said of most collapses.
But there are different kinds of collapses. There are total collapses, such as the USSR where the entire national system just completely fell apart. Then there are more segmented collapses, where different parts of the country (Detroit) or sectors of the economy (banking, housing, construction) fall apart, leaving the rest weakened but still standing. Then you have all the stuff that happens on the level of individuals and families, such as bankruptcy.
Each level feeds into the next. If enough regions or sectors go down, it can bring down the whole system with it. Likewise, if the disintegration of families becomes too widespread, every other aspect of society falls apart. We see this right now in a lot of Black communities right now. Police brutality is certainly a problem, but it is a symptom and not a cause.
Very rarely does a super-virus come out of nowhere and turn everyone into zombies. The collapse happens gradually, then suddenly. People who know what they’re looking for can see it coming a long ways away. Everyone else clings to their false and misleading narratives (“the housing market can only go up!” “the rich should pay their fair share!” “Black lives matter!”) because the message is comfortable and doesn’t require them to change.
That is why self-sufficiency is so important, especially for us writers. We cannot afford to be comfortable. We cannot afford not to change. Perhaps there was a time, way before indie publishing, when writers could just sit back and write pretty words all day, but I doubt it. The industry today is changing so quickly that it’s easy to be left behind.
Every career writer will experience a crisis where they will be forced to reinvent themselves or face the utter collapse of their career. That’s according to Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Katherine Rush, who have been around long enough that I believe them on this point. If you know that your career is going to collapse at some point, shouldn’t you do all that you can to prepare for it? And if you’re already preparing for a personal collapse, why not take the extra step and prepare for something larger?
Personally, I think that the collapse is already upon us. I’m not yet sure what kind it is, or how total it will be, but I do think that when we look back, we will see the Great Recession as a prelude to the main event. Right now, it is easy to ignore or dismiss because no one’s experience of the collapse is the same. We are all like the seven blind mice arguing about the elephant, whether it is a fan, or a pillar, or a rope, or a spear. That’s what makes this period so dangerous: the fact that there’s no shared experience yet. It creates the kind of environment where false and enticing narratives can thrive.
Will we reverse course and take the steps necessary to reverse the collapse? I’m not optimistic. Ever since the Great Recession, our policies have focused on putting off the pain as long as possible rather than fixing the root causes of our social and economic problems. At this point, I doubt that this nation has the political will to endure the pain necessary to fix our problems. In other words, we’re caught in a vicious cycle, and it would take an extraordinary event (like a war) to break us out of it. That, or hitting rock bottom.
But even if something extraordinary did happen, and we avoided the collapse to enter a new era of peace and prosperity, I would still strive to develop the skills and habits of self-sufficiency. Why? Because not all collapses look like the zombie apocalypse. Sometimes, the collapse is so small that no one experiences it except for you.
No matter the variety of collapse, the best way to be prepared is to be self-sufficient. Independence is the ability to take care of yourself when everything else you depend on fails. For that reason, a true indie writer is also a self-sufficient writer.
There is no meaningful difference between Clinton and Trump.
Both are narcissists.
Both are habitual liars.
Both are corrupt.
Both have a tendency to blame others for their failures instead of taking responsibility for their own actions.
Both treat the people underneath them poorly or with outright contempt.
Both think they are above the law, and seek to use the law to put down those who stand in their way.
Both are masters of saying what their audience wants to hear without saying anything of actual substance.
Both have flip-flopped 180 degrees on major national issues.
Both want to accelerate the same fiscal irresponsibility that got us into the Great Recession and prolonged it for so long.
Both are perfectly willing to order the military to do things that violate their sacred oath to defend the Constitution.
Both believe in an authoritarian government that violates constitutional principles and the basic rule of law.
I cannot, in good conscience, vote for either of them.
My greatest political fear is that our Republic is about to be overthrown and transformed into an Empire. We have a system of checks and balances to prevent that from taking place, but that system has been steadily eroded ever since the New Deal (or arguably the Civil War).
Eight years of economic stagnation have created a tremendous amount of restlessness. Looking at global trends, it seems that things are going to get worse before they get better. Historically, this type of chronic restlessness tends to lead to war, as leaders seek to either deflect it toward an outside enemy or channel it for their ruthless ambitions.
And both Clinton and Trump are nothing if not ruthless.
Everything old is new again. The authoritarian ideologies of the 20th century have resurrected and taken on new forms. Every day, I hear echoes of the deadly drumbeats on social media and the news.
Fascism is back. Communism is back. The 21st century equivalent of bookburning is taking place on campuses across the nation. The class warfare that started with the Occupy movement has taken on some decidedly racial undertones. If we’re following history’s playbook, a strong leader will soon emerge, promising security and prosperity at the cost of liberty.
Both Clinton and Trump promise to be that strong leader.
There’s a long tradition of doomsday predictions among political commentators in this country. At the risk of sounding paranoid, I’d like to chime in with some of my own. After all, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean that everyone isn’t out to get you.
First, the gobal economy is about to suffer a massive downturn. China, Russia, the Eurozone crisis—it’s all headed toward collapse. The US will come out on top, but only because we won’t fall as hard as everyone else. We’re still going to take a fall.
Healthcare in this country will continue to be broken and unaffordable for the next four years. Best case scenario, Obamacare collapses and the gridlock in Washington prevents us from replacing it with anything else. Worst case scenario, socialized medicine stiffles innovation, costs and inefficiences skyrocket, and committees are formed to decide who lives and who dies, just like every other nationalized healthcare system.
The originalists on the Supreme Court will be replaced with activist judges who will dismantle the checks and balances of the Constitution, causing it to hang by a thread. Frankly, this is the thing that scares me the most. It’s already starting to happen with the controversy surrounding Scalia’s replacement, and he won’t be the only Supreme Court justice who passes in the next four years. This will be the ultimate legacy of whoever wins the presidency in 2016.
The world is about to get a lot less safe for Americans abroad. It’s already a lot more unsafe after eight years of Obama, but it’s about to get worse. The chaos in the Middle East will spread. Terrorist attacks will accelerate, both abroad and at home. The wars and rumors of wars will increase.
There are a number of unlikely but plausible scenarios I’ve been mulling over. The most frightening of these involves a second American civil war, in the form of an insurgency, and the true nightmare begins when the UN sends a peacekeeping mission into this country much like Lebanon or the Balkans. Like I said, I don’t consider it likely. But it’s just plausible enough that it would make an excellent novel—the kind that later generations laud as being written before its time.
In short, I predict another four years of economic stagnation, fiscal irresponsibility in Washington, cronyism, corruption, and collapse. If America becomes “great” again, it will only be the Empire at the expense of the Republic.
So what am I doing about it?
Stocking up on food storage. Growing a garden. Learning how to be a responsible gun owner. Striving to be as independent and self-sufficient as possible.
And you can bet that all of this is influencing my writing. There’s a war of ideas that’s raging right now, one that may influence the ultimate outcome of our era more than any elected official. As a writer, I see it as my responsibility to play a role in that battle, not through message fiction per say but through stories that reflect truth. I have no idea if any of my stories will be as influential as 1984 or Les Miserables, but I intend to write them as if they could be.
It appears we’ve been cursed to live in interesting times. Let us rise to the occasion and write timeless and interesting stories.
The OP had asserted that Amazon is “still the only real game in town,” which I attempted to refute. It ended with the fine folks at Mad Genius Club putting words in my mouth, threatening to ban me for my “tone,” and calling me a “pompous blowhard” and a “prancing, self-aggrandizing, self-congratulating spunkmuffin.” Which would have been amusing except that… okay, it was pretty amusing. But it was also a bit infuriating to watch so many people deliberately take offense simply because I disagreed with them.
(The irony was especially thick as they viciously attacked me, then turned around and emphatically denied that KU pits authors against authors, all while demanding me to prove to them that it does—often in the same breath.
And for the record, I do not think that there’s anything “dickish” about asking the other side to back up their argument with sources. This is especially true for things that “everybody just knows,” and doubly so when forming a negative argument, such as “no one bothers with outside Amazon.”)
In all fairness, however, there were a few arguments I made that I could have done a better job supporting. And since this is my blog, where no one holds the ban-hammer but me, it seems appropriate to make them here.
First, though, I want to make it clear to any KU readers that I’m not trying make you feel guilty for subscribing to KU. If you are a KU subscriber and you enjoy the program, great! I have nothing at all against that. Whether or not the system is broken, we’ll still find ways to get paid. Have fun, and as always, thanks for reading.
Also, I want to point out that even though I believe KU is broken, I would still love to enroll my books. The problem, as I’ve pointed out before, is that Amazon demands exclusivity for the privilege. Not only am I wary of putting all of my eggs in a basket (especially a broken one), I also think that that’s a bad deal for my readers on iBooks, Kobo, Nook, etc, or who live outside of the territories where Amazon operates. Their numbers are not insignificant.
So why is Kindle Unlimited a broken system? In a word, incentives.
In a healthy system, writers write the books that readers want to read, readers support the writers by voting with their dollar, and the middlemen (publishers, distributors, booksellers, etc) provide value to both readers and writers commensurate with the cut that they take.
A healthy system is not closed. If readers collectively decide to read twice as many books, writers collectively earn twice as much. If another writer’s books do twice as well, it does not take away from the money I earn from my books.
Contrast that with the closed system that is KDP Select. We have only a ballpark estimate for the size of the KU subscriber base. Amazon keeps that (and most other KU-related data) close to the chest. We have no idea if the pay is commensurate with the subscriber base.
Instead, writers are paid out of a fixed pot, the KDP Select Global Fund. If readers collectively read twice as many KU books, it doesn’t increase the size of the pot. The pot only increases if Amazon decides to increase it, which again may or may not be commensurate with the increase in books read, or subscribers enrolled. We have no way of knowing.
Worse, because pay is based on a share of the pot, if someone else’s books receive twice as many borrows, everyone else’s earnings go down—even if their readership remains unchanged.
This is why so many writers are up in arms about the latest KU scandal, covered in depth by Phoenix Sullivan and Ann Christy. To summarize, the current iteration of Kindle Unlimited (KU 2.0) pays authors based on number of pages read, and scammers are gaming the system with text synthesizers and click farms. It’s not impossible to make $500,000 a month with this scam, all of which is taken out of the share of legitimate writers.
Is Amazon working to fix the problem? Until last week, it wasn’t clear that they were—and it’s still an open question if they can. It’s a perpetual game of whack-a-mole where the moles keep getting smarter, increasing the odds that legitimate writers will get whacked.
When you look at the way the incentives are structured, however, there’s nothing surprising about this unmitigated mess. Amazon has divorced the readers from the writers in such a way that pricing signals no longer work. Worse, the fixed pot pits authors against authors in a zero-sum race to the bottom. You do not earn more by simply getting more readers—you earn it by getting more reads than other authors. In the meantime, Amazon keeps lowering the KENPC payment rate, and authors keep bending over.
Is there still value in an ebook subscription service? Readers certainly seem to think so. If there’s value for readers, it shouldn’t be too difficult to also find value for writers.
But when you look back on the history of KU, you realize that it’s not really about providing value for readers or writers, but undercutting Amazon’s competition. KU launched right around the same time as two other subscription ebook services: Oyster and Scribd. These subscription services did provide value to writers, as they paid full price for every completed read.
Amazon responded by launching KU 1.0, which paid writers significantly less. However, since Amazon had most of the ebook market share (at least in the US), and since non-KU books receive much less visibility on the Kindle Store than KU-enrolled books, authors were aggressively pressured to sign up. Amazon’s exclusivity requirements kept its competitors from receiving content, and as a result, they have since either folded (Oyster) or failed to gain much traction (Scribd).
It ultimately comes down to the contrast between makers and takers. KDP Select is a closed system, where the size of the pie is fixed and the best you can expect is to get a larger slice than the person next to you. This turns everyone into a taker: someone who feels threatened by other people’s success and jealously guards their own.
Is it any wonder then that KU authors, when presented with someone critical of the KDP Select program, resort to rhetorical tactics like gaslighting, lampost-moving, name-calling, and conflating disagreement for personal attacks? Sadly, no. These are all classic hallmarks of a taker, which the system has forced them to become. In this way, Kinde Unlimited pits authors against authors.
It’s a broken system, but of course, different people experience the brokenness in different ways. When I was living in Georgia, I met several older people who believed that things were better under Communism. Without a doubt, the Soviet system was broken, but these people did better under it than they did after it fell. In the same way, there are a lot of authors doing very well under KU 2.0 who would love to keep things exactly the way it is.
Several of them employ text synthesizers and click-farms.
And when KU 3.0 comes out, as it inevitably will, it will sort out a new batch of winners and losers just like KU 2.0 did before. Because of Amazon’s exclusivity requirements, many writers will lose just about everything, having developed no other income streams.
But not the scammers. They’ll just find a new way to game the system, based on the way KU 3.0 misplaces the incentives. Amazon will continue to aggressively insert itself between readers and writers, breaking the incentives structure in new and interesting ways.
Also, I’m not sure how this slipped past me, but my short story “The Curse of the Lifewalker” is now available on the Sci Phi Journal! It’s behind a paywall, but you can read the first 20% or so for free. The publishing rights revert back to me next June, so it will be another year before I can indie publish it. In the meantime, the Sci Phi Journal is a great magazine, and you should definitely check them out!
The American Insurgency officially broke out in 2026, as a direct result of Steward vs. The State of California which effectively nullified the 2nd amendment. However, the conflict was rooted in the politics of the previous decade, and the economic realities of the Great Collapse.
I recently became embroiled in