The Simple Things

Yesterday was a particularly nice day, as I finally got my first book review on Amazon.

It’s always a bit scary putting yourself out there and wondering if something you’ve written will resonate with anybody else. But more than anything else the scariest feeling is the idea that nobody will read it at all. And so just knowing that somebody found the story entertaining and worthwhile put me in a happy place. It might not seem like much, but it definitely meant a lot to me. And it’s pretty surprising how it’s rarely the elaborate things that give us joy in life, but the everyday simple things that can put us into the right mood and give us a sense of peace.

A gesture of kindness from a stranger. A good workout session in the morning that puts you into a productive flow for the rest of the day. Learning something new, and applying it properly to the development of a fresh skill. Or just being able to share a laugh and a smile with the person you love. There’s really hundreds of different experiences throughout the day that make all the difference in our lives. And it hardly ever seems to be the crazy things that actually bring us all our happiness.

I’ve made up my mind to not take any of those things for granted.

Aside from all that, I’ve recently been reading The Light Fantastic by Terry Pratchett, which I’ve been enjoying immensely. I’d read the Colour of Magic some time ago and loved the voice of the story, but hadn’t gotten around to reading any other Discworld books since then. I was initially intending to read just Mort next as I’d heard that it was one of the best in the series, but I’m instead reading the exact next story and second book.

I’ve read that The Light Fantastic is the only Discworld book that follows directly after the preceding book in plot, but even if the following stories don’t read like an exact continuation of the series I’m feeling altogether hooked and a bit worried since each of these stories costs $10 and there’s 41 of them. I’m getting sucked in, but I’m not entirely sure I mind. It’s been a great read so far and from everything I’ve heard the stories only get better the deeper into the series you go. Reading always puts me into a good mood, and I’m happy to get to experience this story in sips and gulps here and there whenever I have the time.

Just another one of life’s simple pleasures.

Sanctuary Now

After a long period of time writing three separate manuscripts, a round of rejections totaling into the nineties from literary agents through both cold queries and in person pitches, many of which resulted in requests for partials but none of which manifested in offers of representation…

I am deciding to self-publish my manuscripts.

I apologize that I haven’t been blogging as much as of late, but that’s mainly a product of my having focused on writing and polishing three full length manuscripts that I intend to promote and publish in the coming months and throughout 2018. The first of which is a story about a fallen Angel manipulating the global economy in the 1920’s.

I started writing Sanctuary Now around five years ago in late 2012, and I completed it in its current form after several drafts in early 2016. It’s around 96,000 words in length, and is strongly inspired by Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger, though its setting and overall content is quite different. It’s set in 1925 four years before the economic collapse of 1929, and follows a formerly homeless man named Nathan Dance through a near death experience to a position of power influencing the global economy within a secret organization known as “The Illuminated.” And along the way, he’s taken by a mysterious stranger to see slivers of the tragic future and past of the Earth.

It’s available today on Amazon Kindle, and is enrolled in Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing, so it’s absolutely free for anybody with a kindle unlimited subscription.

I’ve also written two separate manuscripts which are two parts of a series I intend to make into a trilogy. They are thrillers based around masked psychopaths inflicting a viral pandemic on the world, and a character named Elliot Hayes whose blood may be the only hope for protecting people from the outbreak. They are around 70,000 words and 90,000 words in length, and I have very real intentions of getting professional cover art for them both.

If you’re at all interested in reading these stories, click here to read Sanctuary Now on Kindle and swim in a sea of existential nihilism. I’m hopeful that I can get some help funding the launch of my other books through what might come my way with Sanctuary Now. And I hope that, with some luck with these three stories, I might be able to really start converting my writing into a source of livelihood, and accelerate my writing pace.

A piece of the reason I wrote Sanctuary Now and set it in 1925 is because I believe that we are currently enjoying a time of relative economic stability and potential coming prosperity in the wake of the Great Recession. But this period of protracted growth with artificially low interest rates might end in an economic boom and a secondary 2008esque collapse. And so we may not realize just how perilous an economic period we’re in, just as people in 1925 didn’t know how perilous a time was coming in 1929.

All things considered, I just really love writing stories. It’s a flow activity that I’ve become addicted to, and I’m hopeful that my obsession with writing might be able to provide some value to those people who read those stories, as they’ve provided value to me in the making of them. I’ve never felt more at peace as I do while writing.

It’s the only thing that’s ever made me feel free.