opinion – Atomic Slingshot Press

My Weight. An Update.

As I have mentioned a few times before, my weight is an issue for me. The bonus goal I made at the start of the year was to lose 20 pounds. I recorded my weight as 277lbs. My weight today is 255lbs. That means I have lost 20 lbs. I succeeded in my goal—hurrah for me.

The goal was reached by controlling my diet and using intermediate fasting. It allowed me to lose weight with little effort.

I will be correcting and adding to my goal. No sense waiting around for me to get fatter. I have also flatlined. Plateaued. I am not losing any more weight. This means I will have to change my habits. Taking up some more exercise will be beneficial. With the COVID lockdown and shortages throughout, I have ordered a pair of sneakers online. They are stuck in Montreal for some reason. Once I get that, some jogging is in my future.

I am not a fan of gyms. I have had a few gym memberships in the past and have always ended with spending more money than it was worth. The deals tie you into a set membership. Or if there is no contract, then the price is expensive. Plus, they are always far away from where I live, and I hate having to fight through traffic to get to the gym.

Running seems like it is a decent solution. I used to run in high school. It is something I want to start again. Maybe do a marathon once I get to that level, and they allow marathons. If they enable marathons.

I recognize that I need to change my lifestyle. It consists of me sitting at my desk, working for twelve to fourteen hours a day. I need to move more and be more active. It is a habit I need to pick up, I need to figure out how to do this while still getting my work done.

This journey is not something I can do alone. It takes support from many people for it to become a reality. The easiest way is to visit my Amazon Author Page and purchase one of my books. They are available in all countries and for free in Kindle Unlimited. I do have a tip jar set up at Ko-Fe, where you can buy me a coffee. Or you can also visit me on Facebook. Your help and support are much appreciated.

I did a thing… then got to do another thing!

So I wrote a thing and then I was invited to another thing.

Alive After Reading is a podcast where Tim talks to writers about writing and everything in between. I am not the only author on the show. He has interviewed some like Paul E Cooley, Sarah Johnson, and H.M. Gooden. Take a listen, you won’t be disappointed.

But to my weekly blog.

Throughout my time blogging, I have written about various topics from futurism to my theories about motivation and everything in between. I tend to talk about what I want, and I may repeat myself. I’m not much of a good blogger. I just write words on Sundays, some of them have a specific topic, the rest are ramblings. Like this one.

As a writer, my greatest strength is that I write lots. I don’t see it as I see others who write more. My wife kindly reminds me that more traditional published authors only write and publish a single novel per year, and I have already got that done, and its only May. I will have two more novels published before July. Plus, I have three more novels, another trilogy that will be published by the end of the summer.

This excites me as it is two years of work is coming to frustration. A lot of time was spent learning my process. How do I write a boatload of words, plus edit them without losing momentum? Also, how do I write every day, while juggling school, novels, second drafts, edits, proofreading, marketing, social media, my wife and my kids?

That is what took me two years to learn. Juggling my priorities to the best of my abilities. My solution is to keep my goals reasonable (my wife laughed at this line when I told her) and to lose the unneeded things in my life. This was video games, movies, and TV. The parts of my life I don’t need. I write instead.

If you want to get a goal done, then sacrifices must be made with an eye for priorities.

This journey is not something I can do alone. It takes support from many people for it to become a reality. The easiest way is to visit my Amazon Author Page and purchase one of my books. All of my books are available on Kindle Unlimited, and if you have a subscription, they are free. Help support me by reading my books. I do have a tip jar set up at Ko-Fe, where you can buy me a coffee. Or you can also visit me on Facebook. Your help and support are much appreciated.

COVID and the Haircut.

With the economy shut down, many businesses are closed. This post is not about politics or whether or not it was wrong to lock down or to stay locked down. This post is about hair.

All around the interwebs, there are memes about the COVID hair cut. Where someone tries to cut their own hair or the hair of a loved one. This ends up in hilarious horribleness.

For me, this is not the case. My wife has cut my hair for the last five years. The one change for me is that I have stopped shaving. A razor hasn’t touched my face in over sixty days.

But before that, I had stopped shaving. Not because I was lazy (like now), but because I was at 289lbs. I was fatter than I was now, and I have discovered, to my horror, that I had another chin. So I grew my beard out to hide that.

Now, I am weighing 258lbs, and my additional facial flab may be gone. I am not 100% sure as my beard covers my face. It could be gone, but I have no intention of finding out.

What do you think about my facial hair?

This journey is not something I can do alone. It takes support from many people for it to become a reality. The easiest way is to visit my Amazon Author Page and purchase one of my books. They are available in all countries and for free on Kindle Unlimited. I do have a tip jar set up at Ko-Fe, where you can buy me a coffee. Or you can also visit me on Facebook. Your help and support are much appreciated.

February 2020 Update

With the ideal of keeping honest and transparent, here is a breakdown of February.

Before I start. Oops.

At the end of January, there was supposed to be an update posted for the month. This had been missed. It had been written and not posted. So this means goal 11 will not be able to be completed. But that’s okay. I will make the other blog posts and keep going.

To sum up January, this was the second-best month I have ever done at 57k words. My editing is doing well making the daily editing goals.

Goal Recap.

2020 GOALS

Write 600,000 words in publishable story related projects.

Write every day of at least 500 words making words in a row at 731 days in the road.

Catch up on editing allowing no more than 2 manuscripts waiting to be edited.

Edit every day of 1 chapter at a minimum.

Secure cover art for any book in the editing stage.

Publish a minimum of 1 book.

Publish a minimum of 3 books.

Publish a minimum of 5 books.

Publish a minimum of 7 books.

Write one blog post a week.

Write update blogs at the start of every month.

Clean up Tokyo Tempest #1 with a proofread.

Write and submit 5 short stories to markets.

Publish 7 short stories or novellas to amazon.

Set up a Patreon account.

Set up proper social media author accounts and a proper newsletter.

Have 1 paying client of editing services.

Make 100 dollars one month through publishing.

Make 500 dollars one month through publishing.

Make 1000 dollars one month through publishing.

(Bonus) Get back in shape physically by losing 20 lbs.

There are my goals for 2020. I won’t be able to get the number 11 cause of my goof. But I will get others. I’m sure there are going to be many that I won’t be able to accomplish.

Breakdown of Goals.

As I have so many goals, and many of them build on others, I will be only going over the goals I am dealing with at the moment.

Write 600,000 words in publishable story related projects.
- I am at 105k words for 2020. This month I wrote 47,811 words. If I keep this pace up, I will be around 631k words for the year. This is good. I am writing more than I did last year.
Write every day of at least 500 words making words in a row at 731 days in the road.
- I am on day 426 of 731. I am making my goal. Every little bit helps.
Catch up on editing allowing no more than 2 manuscripts waiting to be edited.
- I have five manuscripts waiting to be editing or currently being edited. Progress is being made. I think.
Edit every day of 1 chapter at a minimum.
- This is being done. I have more focus on this than my other goals.
Secure cover art for any book in the editing stage.
Publish a minimum of 1 book.
Publish a minimum of 3 books.
Publish a minimum of 5 books.
Publish a minimum of 7 books.
Write one blog post a week.
- This is being done. I have one to talk about today, which will go up after this one is done.
Write update blogs at the start of every month.
- See above.
Clean up Tokyo Tempest #1 with a proofread.
Write and submit 5 short stories to markets.
- I should write some short stories.
Publish 7 short stories or novellas to amazon.
Set up a Patreon account.
Set up proper social media author accounts and a proper newsletter.
Have 1 paying client of editing services.
Make 100 dollars one month through publishing.
Make 500 dollars one month through publishing.
Make 1000 dollars one month through publishing.
(Bonus) Get back in shape physically by losing 20 lbs.

Future plans.

More of the same, but with more short pieces written. With the three I am apart of, it has helped my Amazon Rankings and has gotten me a few sales. I do want to get a few other books published, however.

The Cell: Review

This is something completely different. A review of a book.

Enjoy.

In 2005, the King of Authors, Stephen King wrote the biggest pile of toilet paper I have ever read, and I’m a Creative Writing Major, so I read a lot. Cell is full of broken promises and a wandering plot. Clayton Riddell is a graphic artist visiting Boston to get his first book deal. At 3:03pm, the “Pulse” blasts everyone else’s brain into jelly, then turns them into ravenous zombies. Clayton needs to find his way home in Maine to find his kid, who he left with his ex-wife, all before the child gets turned into a brain-dead beast.

Admittedly, the opening section of the novel is amazing. It reads like the best of the Zombie Apocalypse genre. From page one to where Clayton and his companions get out of downtown Boston, tension rises and the threat Clayton might die is real. He doesn’t know who to trust but must trust someone.

Despite the initial promise, this story is not meant to be a Zombie Apocalypse. The author meant the novel to be a psychological horror; the first broken promise of Mr. King. Once the first day is over, tension from the zombies disappears, never to be seen again, like the precious time it took me to read this horrid piece.

King gets nothing accurate with firearms. One: it’s called a magazine, not a clip. Two: revolvers don’t eject spent brass on their own. Three: in the United States automatic firearms are banned. Four: the AK-47 has been banned in Massachusetts since 1994. Five: even if obtained from out of state, it won’t fire thousands of rounds a second.

In addition, Clayton and his companions don’t use the looted weapons in any meaningful way. This adds another broken promise King in his Godhood doesn’t fulfill.

The Zombies develop from the standard brainless ones to something different and unique. This strategy is meant to adapt a dry trope. However, the developments of the zombie evolution into new psychic beings aren’t seen by Clayton. It’s told to him by a plethora of useless bit characters, all of whom exist to tell Clayton one fact, and to never be seen again.

The last major issue in this crap-tastrophe is Clayton’s kid. Throughout the novel, Clayton yearns to find him, but he doesn’t try to get home. He wanders around the countryside getting sidetracked. Spoiler, the reader isn’t introduced to the boy until the very end of the novel.

Why is this strategy an issue? There is no tension generated with the kid. He’s just a name repeated. If Emperor King had put one tiny scene at the start of the novel, introducing the reader to Clayton, his ex-wife, and his kid playing on a cellphone, then there would be tension, a plot worth reading and forgiveness for the other sins. If he had done all that, I wouldn’t have thrown this book across the room and off my balcony, before going outside to retrieve it as it was assigned reading for a class.

Time Management and Choices

Eighty-six thousand, four hundred.

The argument made to me was to imagine having a job earning 86,400 dollars a year. Then imagine making a wrong choice and losing 400 dollars. Are you willing to toss the rest of the 86,000 dollars away for that simple error?

Let me say this another way, there are 86,400 seconds in a day. If an argument takes six minutes of your day, does it make sense to toss the rest of the day away?

This story has been told before but smarter people than myself. It is not new.

I ended up telling this story to my son, trying to teach him about time management instead of having mental health get the best of a person, which was the initial purpose of the story.

My son was up at eleven at night, wanting to read a book after I had told him all day to do just that. He spent the day playing video games, and it was hard to get him to understand that the choices he made had consequences. For him, it was that if he played video games all day, then he had no time to read a book.

But this is relevant to me. I make choices every day, and they have consequences. If I play a video game, I end up losing hours from my life. I have a long list of goals I want to accomplish, and if I make bad choices, spending those 86 thousand seconds on bad decisions matters.

Time is the biggest commodity we are all given each day. Sleep for eight hours: that’s 28,800. Argue with your spouse: that’s 600. Binge-watch 6 hours worth of Netflix: that’s 21,600. These add up. I work at my writing between 6 and 10 hours a day: that’s between 21,600 to 36,000 each and every day. I do it cause I don’t watch Netflix. I don’t let myself throw away all 86,800 for 1000 worth of a bad day. I’m not perfect, but I strive to make each day better than the last.

So, how do you spend your 86,400?

Studying past battles to Write about the Future

As you may know, I am a lover of history and a futurist. I have previous blogs where I talk about some of my thoughts on the future. I also study history.

I look at the reasons events happened and how it affects the people living through the events. This is for two primary purposes. Studying historical geopolitics allows for more realistic stories. And stories are about people, after all.

Events in the past have echoes that reverberate through time. This can be argued by using the Treaty of Versailles (the treaty that ended World War One) and how it helped sew the seeds of World War Two. Another example is how the end of World War Two set the stage for the following Cold War. One event sets up another as no event happens in a vacuum and no events happen without context.

It is impossible to understand the reasons for the Vietnam War and the Korean War without understanding why the Cold War was even a thing. Once the Cold War is understood, then both events become clear. The reasons the leaders made specific decisions will make complete sense once the context is understood.

For an author, this is important to make sure the situation the characters are tortured in, makes sense. There are dozens of novels with unsubstantiated geopolitical events with armies waging uninformed events. Understanding geopolitical history can allow science fiction and fantasy authors to have realistic settings.

An example of this is where a science fiction story has a large amount of trench warfare. Understanding the events of World War One and World War Two will tell the author that trench warfare is impossible if one of the enemies is mobile. The French learned this the hard when Divisions of Panzers circled around the Maginot Line. In World War One, trench warfare was a reaction to the use of machine guns and artillery. This devastated infantry in the open without cover. In World War Two, trenches were used on a smaller scale to hold specific strategic points. In a futuristic science fiction story, trench warfare will only happen if mobility is removed. Why hide in a trench when you can drive back to safety?

Living throughout the event is a single important person. This one person is who the story is about. A story can’t be easily told about the event. Then it becomes a history text. This is shallow and dull to the reader.

Studying how a person lived in the middle of a vital event allows an author to truly understand him. A soldier fighting in World War One will experience war differently than World War Two, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. These soldiers all experience the horror of war. However, it’s unheard of a soldier in the Vietnam War to have to go over the top to charge the enemy trenches. Soldiers of World War Two enjoy knowing which way the enemy is, luxuries a soldier of Vietnam never experienced.

What does all of this mean for an author?

That is simple. The urge to write a futuristic story that mimics a historical event or situation is great. I’ve read a few where the soldiers fought a large, final melee charge at the climax of the book. This makes no sense when they have rifles and bullets. A futuristic science fiction battle would be different if the enemy has a battle fleet in orbit. This is also evident when an author tries to explain how the war started. One event breeds another, which breeds another.

Once the geopolitical and methodology of the event is set up, then the soldier’s experience can be modelled to make some type of sense. If a soldier on the Western Front of World War One had to describe his war, he might choose “Mud.” One fighting in Africa in World War Two might use the word, “Sand.”

Scraping the very Bottom

This blog post is not about running out of ideas as I don’t have that problem. It is also not about running out of money as I try not to talk about that.

This post is to talk about November 2018, but this isn’t about politics. I don’t talk about politics on this page.

In November 2018, I had hit rock bottom. My writing had flat-lined in terms of quality. I had no idea which mistakes I was making. I know I was making them, but I had no idea why or how to fix them.

I was also unable to write any length of work. I had seven different novels partially written, and I was unable to figure out how to fix them.

In short, I was ready to quit. I was going to give up and toss the towel.

I had written some novels, I knew I could do it again, but I was unable to figure out how to do it again.

Statistically, there is a higher chance for a novelist to quit as they are unable to finish the novel. However, I was getting into the part where I was going to quit due to the lack of progression.

For anyone reading this, who feels the same. This is not the time to throw in the towel. Think about all the time spent getting to the stage you are at. This is the time to double down and try again. It might be time to take a course or two. Or to spend money on an editor or critiquer.

This is not the time to quit. Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.

Being Creative and Dealing with Distractions: Interwebs

Last week, I talked about the giant distraction creatives have to deal with called Children. However, they are only one of the many distractions we have to deal with. The big one I have to deal with is the internet.

Easy access to the plethora of human knowledge and the trillions of cat videos. This is an immense distraction that keeps me from writing as much as I’d like.

I understand it is a problem, and I can stop anytime. I just don’t want to.

In all seriousness, here are five methods I use to mitigate my internet addiction.

Five Methods to Keep Distractions at Bay.

Turn off the internet.
Go to a coffee shop/ library.
Keep track of internet time usage.
Take away visual and use it for noise.
Limit research.

Turn off the internet.

The easiest way to keep the distractions at bay is to turn them off. The internet is addicting, and it’s easy to want to do a straightforward thing, but get distracted by something on the internet. For those with no ability to limit themselves, turning it off is the best way to go.

For those that don’t know, at the bottom right of the computer is a simple internet button. Two clicks on that, and the internet is dead. For those that can’t control themselves, there is an ability to have your significant other enter a parental control password. Then not only is the internet off but then the creative must beg for the password.

Go to a coffee shop/ library.

One way to remove oneself from the distractions called the internet is to go down to the favorite coffee shop and sit there for a few hours. This is good if the internet is too accessible in the home. Coffee shop internet is never very good, being split between an untold number of different people. This is the perfect spot to get some work done.

This doesn’t mean to only go to a coffee shop, five dollars a day in coffee gets expensive. There are also libraries, which are good places to go to. There are also parks, malls, universities, etc that are all good places to go out to get work done.

Keep track of internet time usage.

For those with a good amount of will power, keeping track of internet usage time and turning it off when the set amount of time is up. I’m not this type of person. I can’t turn on and off the distraction. I don’t have enough will power.

But I know of a few people who can. They must have the focus of a God. It must be a great thing to be able not to get distracted by the internet. I assume its a learned skill but the amount of willpower needed sounds immense.

Take away visual and use it for noise.

One method is to let things play in the background. The idea is to turn on noise, music, commentary, etc. This is to train yourself to control the noise being played, especially for those that work in a noisy environment. By playing something in the background, the idea is to have something interesting to keep the focus on the noise, but not enough to maximize the tab and watch the video.

This is the method I tend to do more than any of the others. I will listen to music, but I’ve also been listening to documentaries while I work on my writing. I use headphones and they block other distractions from keeping me from getting the work done.

Limit research.

One of the greatest issues is squirrels. This is when the creative stops working and to do some “quick” research. This starts with good intentions but quickly goes off the rails. The creative needs to look up one issue, and then they blink for a few minutes to discover hours have passed. They have been watching cat videos for hours.

I’ve been here, I look up one detail on space travel. I blink to discover I have been watching police chase videos. This is a bad thing for getting anything done. To keep from doing it, I limit my research by either writing notes to do the research later, or by keeping it to the topic I need to lookup.

The Importance of Making Goals

Being the new year I hear all the time that people can’t do resolutions. Or that resolutions don’t work. To prove my point, I am going to bring attention back to my spreadsheet I made last January and filled out over the year.

This is what I did with my 2019 New Years’ resolution. Most resolutions aren’t things that take a single day or a month. They usually involve solving something large in their life. Losing weight is the most common, while others want to make more money.

They usually fail cause they don’t have a real plan on how they are going to enact those plans. They think things will just change when they won’t.

In order to make your life better for the long term, the change must be fought for every day. If a person isn’t willing to keep at it every day, then the resolution will fail.

This is why I have a daily goal. I have a setlist of small daily tasks that will equal the larger goal. As long as I make the daily goals, I will make my monthly goals. That will make me earn my yearly goals. Without these smaller goals, they are no way to keep track of the larger goal.

So if you have a New Year Resolution and want to be successful, then break the goal down into the smaller pieces. Then if you have the discipline to continue each day, you will be successful in your resolution. I did it, and so can you.