A Make-Do May

This month I made-do with what I had and came out pretty good. 


I wrote 115,354 words, up from the 85,719 last month. I also put out 43 blog posts, which is actually one less than last month. For the year I’ve written 520,084 words.

I didn’t publish any books in May, continuing my trend this year of lazing-about. I do feel the quality of my work is up, however, and we’ll discuss that below.

Bach-ing It Up

This whole month my wife Jenny and son Paul will be gone. They’re in Chicago right now and then they’ll go to Russia for a couple weeks. So I’m alone and working all the time. Maybe next week when I get a bit more bored I’ll go out and wander around a bit, but for now, it’s just a lot of work, work, work. I like it that way.

My ‘schedule’ is getting way off, I’m staying up later and getting up later, and I’m going off in some interesting directions. You’ll notice this in my next non-fiction book.

Montana History

I’ve been going balls to the wall on my latest history book, Feds and Farmers, which should be out this month. I’ve already got 78,000 words on the damn thing, but considering that’s not even as long as the first Harry Potter book, I think you’ll be alright. Check out this cool infographic post called Word Counts of Famous Books for more tidbits like that.

Anyways, the book is good, and I’ve decided to go ahead and do the alternate history route.

What does this mean?

It means I’ll go out on a limb and tell what I think is the true history of the world, not some made-up hokum that’s been passed around for decades and decades. The good thing is that so few know their recent history that they won’t know the difference between what’s “true” and what’s “not.”

For instance, who killed Kennedy? That’s a question that everyone wants to know, and while I don’t have the answer to it, I’m certainly not going to put in my book that Oswald was the lone gunman and sole person involved in that. 

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Alright, that should make it pretty clear to you that when I say ‘alternate history’ I mean conspiratorial history. I feel as though I’d be doing a disservice to you if I followed the regular story, such as the single assassin of Kennedy. No, I’d much rather explore some of the alternate explanations, hopefully landing on the correct one.

Of course I won’t have to worry about this for another six to nine months as Kennedy is in the 1960s and my current book ends at 1960. That doesn’t mean I can’t explore other interesting subjects, like:

• The rise of chemicals and additives in our food;
  

• The decline of the family farm in favor of big agribusinesses;
  

• The control of the monetary system by a select few;
  

• The idea of war as a permanent funding mechanism for debt;
  

• The rise of the military industrial complex;
  

• The weakening of government in the face of industrial and global interest groups.
  

Those are all things that I explore in this book, and it’ll offend a lot of people. What I say about Israel will offend a lot of people, but you have to realize, we’re building up to today. Do you want to understand how the world operates today, or do you want to have some fantasy notion of how things ought to be?

With my history you get the unvarnished truth, and it will disturb you. I really want to put some excerpts out over the next few weeks, but I’m feeling nervous. I’m telling you – this book and the coming books will ruffle some feathers.

Word Counts

This month I tried something a little different – I didn’t keep a running tally of my word count. Oh, I listed them in the spreadsheet each day, but I didn’t have the total going like I usually do. That means I didn’t know how close I was to 100,000, which is the number I shoot for each month. Of course I overshot it pretty good this month, but I think it might be something you want to try if you want to challenge yourself.

Flight 370

I’m having some fun writing my book Flight 370. Well, I haven’t written anything on it in about a week or more, but it’s getting there. I’d like to show off this cool chart I’m putting together, one that helps explain the intricate and dark world I’m building:

Shadow Government novels

So this is a power structure chart for Washington and the American government as well as the shadow government that pulls its strings. I’ve been building this up in my mind for awhile, and I found this cool chart of the “real” shadow government and just changed some things. Actually, I still need to put some new names in there, but there’s no rush.

If you like thrillers, this book will be for you. I’m trying to tie the beginning and ending together now. Most stories have a beginning and an ending but the best have two.

You can think of a movie like The Princess Bride, where the grandpa comes in and that starts the story, but things don’t really start until you get to the story world.

That’s what you need to do with your story, and I’m not saying this book takes place in two worlds, but I’m trying to say that it slingshots you around so that you’re not sure where you are. That way you can flashback to something that you started with, but the reader will be surprised, pleasantly of course, like they’re seeing an old friend they hadn’t seen in awhile. At the same time, they begin to pine for that friend they were just with, and the key is bringing those friends together again at the end.

It’s tricky, and it’s a style I’ve been trying to work with more. I followed that strategy with Colter’s Winter, and it worked pretty well.

Colter’s Winter

I was a little disappointed that Colter’s Winter had such a slow start last month. Since then, however, the book has really taken off. It got 5 sales last month and then another 20 this month. With the print and D2D sales, it’s up to 27 total sales.

That’s pretty good, as most of my fiction just goes flat real fast. Maybe this book will too, like Dulce Base did early this year. I put that one out in December and it got 60 or so sales pretty fast, but since then it gets just a few a month (it has 80 total sales now).

Huh. What can you do? Advertising I guess, but I find that has a diminishing marginal utility, meaning it doesn’t work as good after awhile, at least for the same books. A Book 2 might help, and that’s what I have planned for both Dulce Base and Colter’s Winter. I guess it comes down to priorities and what projects should come first. That’s tricky, and right now non-fiction seems to have taken hold.

A Look Ahead

So what’s up for June? My wife and son are gone all month so I have a lot of time. The rent is also paid and I feel confident I can pay it again next month too. That means I can work on anything I want, and I will. This is what you can look forward to:

• Feds and Farmers coming out later this month in print and eBook format;
  

• Flight 370 coming out late this month or next month in both print and eBook format;
  

• Some more blog posts that talk about books;
  

• Fewer posts in the Midweek Content Roundups;
  

• More emphasis on ghost stories as I put together a short story collection book;
  

My fiction books on Apple, Barnes & Noble, Google Play, and many other retailers as I move away from being exclusive to Amazon;

 

Alright, that’s about it. Please check out some of my books on Amazon.

• If you haven’t started my Montana history series, now would be a good time to start. 
  

• If you want to get your website moving or your books selling, check out my marketing and SEO books. 
  

• If you want to have some good laughs, check out my short thriller novels.
  

Thanks for reading!