Category Archives: books

Review me…

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Retribution: Chasing Hearts and Minds has been out there in the wild for a little over a week now. I know from a few private messages and from the retailer’s weekly reports that a few copies are floating around. The individual feedback has been overwhelmingly positive – and trust me I never get tired of hearing good things about myself so I thank all of you who have taken the time to drop me a note. I do, however, have one small favor to ask of those of you who have already purchased your own copy (and those of you who plan to purchase your copy in the future).

It would be incredibly helpful for me if you’d go back to your retailer’s page and leave a review. I’d never presume to tell you what kind of feedback to give – either positive or negative – but as I’ve learned the hard way, when it comes to selling ebooks, nothing gets a no-name work noticed like good reviews and ratings. In addition to total sales numbers, reviews are a big part of the secret algorithms the big retailers use to decide what moves up the rankings, what gets featured, and what doesn’t.

Retribution will probably never make it to Amazon’s top ten in ebooks > sci-fi > dystopian, but if someone were to happen across it using a key word search, a few reviews could really help make the difference between picking up their own copy and moving on to the next alternative.

To pick up your own copy or leave a review, all you need to do is follow one of these helpful links:

Once you’re there, I’m sure you can figure out what to do without any more prodding from me. Now go forth and say great things!

Retribution…

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Retribution - CoverGod watched His creation evolve since long before the written word. He watched even as the first vertebrate flopped out of the sea. He watched long before that. He had great expectations for this new world. This was the one He hoped would finally get it right.

Even though Man was created in His image, they possessed a particularly irksome ability to veer wildly off script. It didn’t help that God’s one-time right hand spent every waking moment for eons finding new and exciting ways to tempt them away from their pre-ordained course.

Once upon a time, a bit of flooding, razing a few misbehaving cities, a smiting here and there, and the occasional miracle had been enough to keep the masses on the straight and narrow. In an age of endless entertainment and short attention spans, even an omniscient and almighty God was apt to have trouble getting His point across.

Retribution: Chasing Hearts and Minds is the story of what happens when the Old Testament God clashes head-to-head with the modern world.

My virgin effort at fiction in a short story format is available now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords.

Roadmap…

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So, we’ve got the cover, we’ve got the narrative, and we’ve got the sales blurb. That means it’s time to race over to Amazon and get this thing published, right? Well, the answer there is more of a “sort of” than a yes or no. I’m not ready to pull the trigger today, but as always I have a roadmap laid out in my head of what I think the way ahead looks like for Retribution.

Sometime between tonight and Friday I’m going to load it onto my Kindle and read the thing from cover to cover one last time. I’ve discovered through a lot of trial and error that just because you think you followed all the formatting rules for e-readers, there’s a pretty good chance that you screwed something up. Unfortunately that mostly shows once you have things loaded onto the actual device itself. Yet another of the minor pitfalls and annoyances of self publishing that in the end will be worth the trouble. Fixing those will be the main event for this weekend.

Sunday, if all goes according to plan, is going to be the great day of reckoning. That’s when I’ll sit down in the morning and start uploading the final product to the retailers. I’m going to work primarily through Amazon and Barnes & Noble, but also fall in on Smashwords to get access to their own storefront as well as take advantage of their “special relationship” with Apple’s iBooks. By the time everyone’s long weekend is ending, Retribution: Chasing Heart’s and Minds should be going live. That’s the roadmap, anyway. How close that comes to reality remains to be seen.

Not sold…

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Earlier this morning, while waiting for one of the endless piles of laundry to finish, I gave birth to a third draft. What we have is fully formed, edited, formatted, and copyrighted short story. I’d be lying if I said I was completely happy with it. Then again, you can count on one hand the number of times I’ve ever been completely happy with anything, so take that with a Copyrighthealthy dose of salt. I’m happy enough with the content – aside from the inevitable grammar, punctuation, and usage stuff – but my real hang up at the moment is the title; Retribution: Chasing Hearts and Minds.

That’s not the first title. It’s not the second or even the fifth. It’s the eighth if I’m counting correctly. I’m just not sold on it yet even though it feels like the best of the bunch. Having said that, I’m not currently in a mode of letting the perfect stand in the way of the good enough.

This little project of mine is moving out. I’ve just launched it into the hands of someone who was there at the beginning to give this draft its first formal read through. Letting other people see one of these things is the most nerve wracking part – especially when that person reads. A lot. It means you’re going to get compared to people who do this for a living. That’s a tough standard to meet when you’ve cobbled the idea together a few hundred words at a time working nights and weekends. Still, it’s my baby and that means I’ll be immensely proud of it even if the rest of the world thinks it’s ugly as sin.

Soon enough you’ll all get the opportunity to make up your own minds on the issue. I just hope I’ve done the work well enough to meet expectations. Everything else is gravy.

For the grads…

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With graduation just around the corner, I’m going to take this Sunday morning opportunity to plug what I think is the essential gift for each and every one of them. And what better gift could you give the graduate in your life than their very own copy of Nobody Told Me: The Cynic’s Guide for New Employees? It’s the gift that says “I care about your future.”

Sure, I know this probably seems self serving, but do you really want your graduate to walk out into the professional world starry-eyed and unsuspecting of the sheer volume of ridiculous shit that’s awaiting them at every turn? Yeah. I didn’t think so. This is the field guide that you and I didn’t receive. We had to learn these little life lessons the hard way. Why not let the next generation benefit from our hard won lessons learned?

So that’s my pitch this morning. Click over to Amazon, or Barnes & Noble, or Smashwords and show that special person in your life that you really do care about their future. You do care, don’t you?

Thrones…

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I had great expectations for last night’s premier of Game of Thrones. Aside from the minor distraction of trying to figure out why one of the supporting characters didn’t look at all like himself from last season, I can legitimately say I was beyond pleased with how the whole thing turned out… setting aside for purposes of this discussion that each week’s episode could easily be a 2 hour feature film in its own right. Everyone and their brother has already written a review so I’ll spare you those details here.

What I really want to comment on is the unique fandom of Westeros; where the people who read the book are constantly spoiling it for those who haven’t, the people who have only watched the TV show are inordinately annoyed by the book-reader’s enjoinders that something “wasn’t right,” the general consensus is that George R.R. Martin is possibly the most bloodthirsty author of all time, and the sheer volume of characters makes you wish you’d have printed out the Game of Thrones Illustrated Study Guide before settling in for a new episode. And then there are the people who don’t watch, don’t get the fuss, and are mostly overjoyed when the season ends and people around them find something else to talk about. Despite all that, my inner geek takes a serious amount of joy at seeing so many non-geeks drawn into Martin’s world of high fantasy. It’s good to know that real story telling might not be dead after all.

I can tell the season of the year as much from the program I watch on Sunday night as I can by what the calendar says. And just now I’m extraordinarily pleased that the winter of the Walking Dead has given way to the spring of Game of Thrones. I think I’m ready for it to be next Sunday now, please.

Holding…

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Anyone who was following along last month might remember that I was giving fiction a bit of a go. Since I haven’t mentioned that little effort in a few weeks, it felt like it deserved an update. If you’re expecting some exciting or late breaking news, this is your fair warning to go find something else to read this evening. That’s because the update is that there really isn’t an update.

Since I set it aside, Unnamed Short Story #1, has been sitting quietly in a file (or in several files to be more accurate). Why? Because if you’ve ever tried finding a mistake in an email you’ve just written, magnify that problem by a few hundred percent and you’ll start to understand what I’m up against.

What’s sitting on the shelf is a first draft. Some sections are barely an outline held together with a bit of awkward dialog. Translation: Almost every word of it is going to have to be rewritten before I even sit down to do any real editorial work. That’s not a complaint. It’s just the process. I know the only way I can even hope to make any objective corrections is to put distance between me and the first draft… and when you’re writing, time is the only real measure of distance there is.

So, USS#1 is in a holding pattern. Honest to God, I’m still incredibly excited that it’s even gotten to that point. Take my word for it, there were plenty of days I didn’t think it would even make it that far. In the meantime, I’m working on a few side projects and giving my alter egos a workout – some of it professional and some of it decidedly not. It might not feel like it from the position of outside observer, but every time I sit down at the keyboard, regardless of what I’m working on, it feels like I’m giving my chops a workout. I don’t know if I’ll ever make any money from doing any of this, but honing whatever modest talents I have still feels like a worthwhile investment.

USS#1 will come off the bench soon enough, but I’d like to let it sit for another two weeks or so. It won’t quite be reading it completely fresh, but a full month away feels like a decent enough amount of time away. How long things take from that point, your guess is as good as mine.

An unsettling dark streak…

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One of the many things I’ve sacrificed on the altar of having more time to write has been the time I use to spend reading. I wouldn’t go so far as to call myself “literary” by any stretch. I wasn’t reading many of the Great Books or even much fiction at all. Far more often it was history, biography, social science – books that taught me things about the world. I’d occasionally venture out into fiction. When I did, it was normally of the pulp variety (not that there’s anything wrong with that). My fiction reading also had a heavy dose of Tom Clancy, James Michener, and Herman Wouk. I liked the books that landed on the coffee table with a satisfying thud. I still like books like that, though the thud is far harder to get with a Kindle than a 1000 page paperback.

As usual, none of that is my point. What I want to turn you on to tonight is a Steven King. Some of you might be familiar with his work. I read a few of his better selling books years ago, but I’m the first to admit horror isn’t my thing regardless of whether it’s in print, movies, or television. Even with that disclaimer, it’s impossible not to recognize Steven King’s absolutely monumental abilities as a writer. The guy is just a force of nature when it comes to using the written word to draw a response out of the reader.

Not long ago, Amazon offered up a screaming deal on one of his books that I’d never heard of before. Since before Christmas I’ve been toting the electrons of 11/22/63: A Novel around without bothering to really give it a look. Until this past weekend. Since then, I’ve been off to the races and using every scrap of free time to get through just another few paragraphs. I tend to find King’s books a little too ghoulish and grisly for my taste, but this one… this one is just different.

Without giving anything away, he pulls you in with a story of time travel, righting past injustice, decisions, consequences, and then paints in a truly unsettling dark streak that you can’t quite put your finger on. It’s just a magnificent piece of work. If you like Steven King, or historical fiction, or just have an itch for a good (if unconventional) goosebumping, 11/22/63 has the jeffreytharp.com seal of approval.