Me, The 90's, and Potential

I have a funny story to tell, funny because while it’s true, and not funny, it’s illustrative of how other people perceive me. Or did at one time. 

Pretty much at the apex of my life

At a time of my life when I was still pretty young, early 20’s I guess, I was a bit of a wonderer. I was drifting along through life (I still am, if I’m being honest with myself here) without any real direction. At the time I worked in a gas station. The gas station was filled with people who had lots of other interests and tons of things that filled their out of work hours.

Let’s see, two guys were in a band that had just gotten signed to a record label and were on the verge of breaking it big.

Two guys had just graduated from college and were football players. One in particular was a QB who had dreams of playing in the NFL – he had an agent, offers on the table to play in the arena league and wrapped up his collegiate career as a pretty successful player.

One of my best friends, who had gotten me the job there, was in a band as well, they were just signed to a record label too. In fact, they were signed to, what was at the time, the largest record label in the world (well, a small label that was owned by the largest label in the world). They knew they weren’t budgeted to be superstars, but they had their foot in the door. Again, it was a big deal.

One day, my good friend and I were chatting about things, the future, what we’re going to be doing in life, you know, when you don’t have any real responsibilities and don’t know that the odds aren’t in your favor. He says to me, “Have you ever thought about how much talent we have here at the store?”

“No.”

“Well,” he said, “think about it, we’ve got Andre, Chris, Scottie, (all discussed above), I feel pretty good about my chances… and yours too.”

“Me?” I asked. “I’m not even playing much anymore.” A reference to my guitar playing.

“Yeah,” he said. “But you’ll do something great.”

And that was that. I never forgot that conversation. He was sincere, and I was touched. I lost touch with most of the guys, except for being Facebook buddies. But none of us, except for him possibly, really achieved anything close to what we’d envisioned. Later on, at his wedding, he introduced me at the rehearsal dinner to the rest of his rather large party as, “the smartest guy I’ve ever known. Go ahead, ask him anything you want to about Star Trek.”

Yeah, that's sounds like something he would say. Good times. In some ways, it was probably close to the high point of my life, in regards to having friends, having no worries, and feeling that the world was my oyster. 

Sigh. I love my life now. But something 'great' hasn't just fallen in my lap. Here's hoping that I'm just a late bloomer.

Add A Caption!

I know, it's stupid. I'm a sucker for this type of stuff though. So please someone add a caption for the picture below (which I whipped up a few months ago for another blog post.).

I have wasted entire days, days, looking at those damn 'add a caption' contests. I don't know why, but for some reason I just have this need, it comes from deep within, and I need to add captions to all pictures. 

It's a curse.

It Started Poorly Then Got Worse...

After yesterday's rant, I had the brief inkling to continue to air my grievances today, but thought better of it at the last moment. I've got a list of things that infuriate me about the world that's a mile long. I could post every day about it, but it makes me miserable. So instead, I figure I'd throw something out there about the state of my writing.

After the full manuscript of my novel was summarily rejected by one big time publisher, I queried a big six publisher and cringe at the crappy query I sent. Really should have proofread that one one more time Still waiting for that next rejection.

A Dead God's Wrath is still hanging around there in the ebook world. Sales to date look like this:

Kindle          Barnes & Noble          Smashwords
25                            6                             2

For a grand total of 33 copies. I'm still pretty pleased with it. I think most of the sales have been to people who stop by the blog on occasion. I do realize I'm a crappy marketer, and would probably do better if I forgot the whole blogging/twitter thing and just wrote more. But I kind of like where I'm at right now with that. I enjoy reading the blogs I follow and I think I write about as much as the family will allow.

I do think I'm going to try to put something else up for sale in an e-format soon. Probably. I'll give it a few weeks for certain, I was listening to a podcast tonight and I started really thinking about why I'm sitting on so much stuff, I have short stories (a few anyway), novels, all sorts of stuff that I've been sitting on for a long time. Most of those need some editing work, which I think is at the heart of why I've not already done that part, as I am not a huge fan of editing. For me it's the difference between designing race cars and being a mechanic. One is a dream come true and the other is what you have to do for the damn thing to work.

So I need to do a lot more of the mechanic type stuff for a while. When nano is over this year I'll dive right into that.

There has been some push back from a number of authors in regards to pricing, as that race to the bottom seems to have, well, bottomed out. First, I saw a very minor author (meaning, they have a small following of fans that will buy anything they produce) selling novellas for $2.99 and it surprised me. Then I heard an interview with another author, one that has no professional sales to their credit, that is selling short stories for $2.99 and doing so with no fanfare, several pen names (for different genres) and no marketing at all on their part, and selling in the hundreds of copies per month. The latter mentioned in the interview that they saw a bump in sales of one of their novels when they raised their novel price to around $5. The logic being that the perceived quality of the cheaper priced book was poor, but when the pricing got closer to what a reader would expect for a professional product then they were more likely to buy. Weird.

So, two instances don't equal a trend, but I'm thinking of playing with my pricing some. I don't think I could ever justify selling something like A Dead God's Wrath for $2.99, I don't think it holds that kind of value. But I also don't think I can really run an experiment with only one data point either. That brings me back to my need to have something else out there.

Anyway, I'm just thinking with my fingers at the moment, typing away, and avoiding working on my nano novel. My town constable has been attacked and carried off by an unnamed assailant. I suppose I should go back and write his death... or not. It's a plot twist I'm anxious to reveal. One of many. So much fun to be had there.

It Started So Innocently But Then...

Genius!

What a rant! I don't know where this came from. Sorry team, we'll try to do better tomorrow.

I think I’ve talked about Neal Stephenson before, actually, I know I have, I just can’t remember when (or which posts), and I don’t really want to talk about him again today except for what it means for my larger topic. He did, however, write of the most brilliantly odd books I’ve ever read in Cryptonomicon, which is a genre defying novel about a code breaker in WWII and his grandson in the present day, both kinda sorta on the hunt for the same thing. Flat out awesome. Drop what you’re doing and go read it quick, before others find out and mock you.

Of course, at a solid 1000 pages long, I’m not sure you can read it real quick, but do what you can.

Anyway, I have plans to read all his books at some point, and have one still sitting on my shelf that I picked up in the great Borders’s fire sale of 2011, but I’ve also got around 50 other books on my shelf I got then as well, it might be a while before I get to it.

Now, what was my point? Oh yes, I heard an interview with him the other day and he mentioned offhandedly about how America has shied away from mega-engineering projects for quite some time.

Also, it's a Star Destroyer!

And boy, did lights start going off in my head.  It’s true, oh so true. My first thought was the James-Webb space telescope. To put it bluntly, it’s the most awesome thing in the history of mankind, and it’s up for debate right now on whether or not it will ever fly. This was designed to be the replacement to Hubble and would be another giant leap forward in our understanding of the cosmos. It’s entering its home stretch in the assembly process, it’s over budget, it’s behind schedule, and it’s almost done. I blame those who budgeted the thing, but only partially. The thing is cutting edge, and we’re pushing the limits of technology, and in some cases, were counting on technologies that didn’t exist when the plans were being drawn up for the thing. It’s an impressive piece of engineering. The reason it might not fly however, is not an engineering one, it's a political one. The funding might get pulled now, in the 11th hour.

The shuttle program… gone. There is a replacement program in the works, but some insiders are doubtful that it will come to fruition. I personally feel like the shuttle program was a mistake anyway, but that’s a different topic. I don’t think ending a program with nothing concrete in the works is a good idea.

It would have been that big!

Anyone remember the superconducting supercollider? The U.S. spent tons of money on this project back in the 80’s and was far enough along in construction in the early 90's that shutting the program down was nearly as expensive as just finishing the damn thing (not really, but it was very expensive). It would have dwarfed the large hadron collider that had so many folks believing the world would end when it opened for business last year.

Even stuff as small scale (relatively speaking) as skyscrapers, the replacement towers for the world trade center got me thinking of when the last truly grandiose skyscraper was built in the U.S. When I was a kid most of the tallest, most awe inspiring structures in the world were the twin towers of the World Trade Center, the Sears Tower in Chicago. I know a lot of the reasons that we don’t continue to build bigger buildings are political – like a beautiful San Francisco building proposal was nixed because it violated height restrictions within the city – and there are federal regulations that would prevent anything similar to the giant tower in Dubai from being duplicated anywhere in the U.S.

Well, now that I look at it, it does look a bit... gaudy

I think the whole thing is depressing. I want to see a base on the moon, a trip to mars, a Manhattan type project to build a space elevator, or a maglev from Florida to Australia. I want to see miles wide solar cells high in orbit beaming down energy to the earth, or a plan to wipe out smallpox... wait, they may have done that one.

I wonder if those big dreams were part of the WWII mindset that carried over into the cold war. It was a time when using atomic weapons as a propellant for space craft wasn’t just a crazy idea, it was tested and ready to implement. Then it all came to a halt.

I want it back. I want us to do something big, so challenging that it might not work. The funny thing is, the main reason given is that it costs too much, that these projects are too much a financial burden, it would be foolish to waste our money on them.

To those who say that, I say you’re wrong. We spend more money on air conditioning in Iraq then we spend on NASA in a year*. I’m not making a political statement (as any discussion about congressional money quickly becomes), I’m just saying we spend money, lots of it, on things that don’t matter that much in the big picture.

The reason for me is two fold, 1) corporations are only interested in their quarterly earnings. Long term projects are those that take 2 or 3 years. We won't see any decades long research coming out of a publicly traded company, there is no money in it.

2) Governments. That's the only way to get really large scale projects done. They actually hire publicly traded corporations to do the big projects, it's inefficient, costs are hugely inflated, and corruption abounds, but it gets done (years late and way over budget). Except politicians are under more and more scrutiny, and they think of long term as their next election cycle, which means a 20 year project to get my ass to mars won't happen there either. They're more likely to make a big deal out of spending money that could be used to feed orphaned tuna is being wasted sending squirrels into space. Space science gets cut, the orphan tuna still starves, but people think that they're being frugal.

The end result. I think we're screwed.  

*What is more profound to me, the total amount of dollars spent on NASA since it's inception in the late 50's totals around $500 billion. A lot, but we've spent about two and a half that amount on the U.S. war on terror.

Well, Crap.

I had a brilliant post all planned out in my head for today, but it was going to take a bit of work and I forgot. As this nano thing is going in fits and starts and I've been getting behind during the week and trying to catch up on the weekends. Of course, this weekend didn't work out that way due to unavoidable surprises. But, like a sick patient, barely hanging in there on life support, my story had a blip of life as I was mired in the depths of my craptacular disaster of a novel. Yes, I had a moment, just a moment, where I felt like it might be salvageable. Big moment. As I mentioned before, my outline went out the window almost from the first paragraph. Probably because I didn't have faith in what I was supposed to write. But it looks like I'm essentially writing three interwoven stories.

 1) Abused wife finds out she has more power than she ever dreamed.

 2) Kid with an identity crises finds out he's a god, wait, maybe a demon. Whatever, either way, it doesn't help his self-confidence.

 3) Town constable finds out every person in the whole damn town is a liar.

 The part I do have worked out, more or less, is how these pieces intersect in the end. Thank goodness. I hope to actually write something entertaining at some point for this blog, but not today. It's Monday after all. I don't understand why we didn't name Monday after Satan. That feels right.

They Should Have Sent a Poet

Because I don't have words for this:

Earth | Time Lapse View from Space | Fly Over | Nasa, ISS from Michael König on Vimeo.

Memory Lane Continues!

Another doodle from work. I was too lazy to take out the rule lines on the notebook. Damn, does smoking ever not look cool? Yes, this is another recycled piece of something I'd already posted, but again. I'm pretty sure no one ever saw it the first time it went up.

I'm doing a fantasy novel for Nano this year, I'm thinking this is my obligatory wizard. The story so far, having a few issues. I'll try to get them all fixed over the weekend.