Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.
—Stephen King (via writingquotes)
Somebody Needs to Write this Story…..
I was on the way to the bus stop the other day when this awesome/hilarious story idea popped in my head. Full Disclosure: I may just be the only person who thinks this story (if written well) would be hilarious. Anyway, here goes:
It’s 3,000 years after the fall of civilization. Earth has been abandoned of all life for awhile now. When the story begins, aliens/non-humans land on earth, only to find out there’s nobody left. Before they hop back on their ship, one of them trips over a hump in the ground. They dig and dig and they find….a book. The book is called “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus.”
The captain of the ship says to his comrades, “We must make our way to Mars at once!”
“What about…Veen…nus, sir?”
“First things first, comrade!” he says. “We must find out what…” He examines the book. “We must find out what a “Men” is and what they’re doing on Mars!”
So, please tell me I’m not the only one who would think this story idea is hilarious. Anybody? at all?
It Makes me Sad When….
- I go to pick up my Red Bull only to find out I just finished it off a minute ago
- That is all
- Too personal, right?
P.S.: This is the saddest photo I could find of a Red Bull can.
There’s a loneliness that only exists in one’s mind. The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby (via han-solo-dolo)
There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it’s like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.
—Ernest Hemingway (via martinaboone)
Have yet to read this book!! MUST READ!!!!!!!!
(by ali+withers)
Books, Dead Fathers, and Other Things Worth Noting
Okay, so I haven’t really been on Tumblr in quite some time. Sure, I’ve reblogged this and that in the last few months, but I haven’t really logged in on a consistent basis since February. So, for all of my diehard EIGHTEEN followers, I sincerely apologize!
There is good reason for my lack of activity, and it’s THIS. So, yeah, I’m awesome and I finally did it. If you didn’t click that ambiguous link, it’s a link to my book listing on Amazon. It’s titled, One Day in 2056 & Other Stories. It’s a short story collection. (obviously) But, this post isn’t really about the book. It’s about my journey to getting it published….A little perspective first.
Two years ago, I penned a novel. Albeit, unpublished. It was the classic autobiographical/trying to be satire/but also literary novel. Well, it sucked. It was terrible. I like to think of it as if Snooki wrote a book. Oh, wait….. Anyway, a few months after that disaster, I participated in NaNoWriMo (2010). I wrote a full length novel about a dentist, who just so happened to be a serial killer. The book was called Residual Effects. The dentist/killer bore witness to his family’s slaughter when he was younger. I even had my friend make a bitchin’ cover. Anywho, while the book itself wasn’t original by any means, it was fun writing. For two simple reasons, 1) I improved my writing from previous novel and 2) It showed me what I needed to work on in the future. Which brings us to my short story collection….
There were some good things in the Dentist-Serial killer novels, but there were also some bad things. It just so happened that the latter outweighed the former. So, I put it aside and decided to work on honing my writing. After reading The Atlantic’s Fiction issue, I decided to take a stab at short stories. I wrote my first short story last August. It was a simple idea. It was about a twenty-something grieving the loss of his mother, and he goes to the place that she took him many times when he was younger. Anyway, I thought I had something, so I handed it off to a few friends and my girlfriend. They seemed to enjoy it. So, I polished it a little and moved onto the next short story. And, one thing turned into another and so by the end of 2011, I had roughly eight or nine short stories I had written from the August until January. I passed a few of them along, and they seemed to get some traction. So, that’s when I decided to publish some of them.
Since I’m sure I’ve already bored you with my pedestrian story about the struggles of my writing, I will not bore you with the tiny details of publishing the collection myself, only to say that I hired ONLY professionals to do all the important stuff: e-book formatting, cover, and editing.
And, so One Day in 2056 & Other Stories was published as an e-book on February 27th, 2012 on Amazon for $2.99. (It was published one day before the 6 yr anniversary of my father’s death, so it had an extra/special meaning).
The book, which was released in print a month after its e-book counterpart, has been on sale for a total of 51 days. So far, I’ve sold a total of 215 e-books, 35 print books, and it was downloaded for free (Amazon KDP Select Promotion) 2,158 times. Perhaps, I’m justifying my low-ish numbers, but I don’t think that’s too bad for an unknown author in his first sixty days without really any marketing besides tweeting a link now and then.
That’s about it. I just wanted to share with everybody what I’ve been up to. It’s an incredible feeling, finally accomplishing what you set out to do, so now all I have to do is keep at it and who knows maybe I’ll hit 1,000 sold before the year ends.
Oh, and I have a general theory that I think is worth noting. Actually, it’s more of rhetorical question, and it is….Are all writers/creators/etc.. just trying to make their dead father’s proud?
