Hugh Howey...My New Favorite (Author) Hero

Why? you ask.

Because the man's got his shit together.

Perusing the internet as I'm prone to do at times, I came across a piece he'd written in response to something author Sue Grafton said of the self-publishing movement afoot today.  I'd go into the details of it, but it's better you read it yourself.  He's got a knack for articulating the argument against Ms. Grafton's take on the matter in a manner that I would not detract from here.

Suffice to say, Ms. Grafton's views are of the old guard, those who would choose to remain above the masses as their betters and not do business in a manner they consider beneath them.

Take a look at Mr. Howey's post.  It's called "My Four Favorite Sue Grafton Novels."

In honor of the South...

I thought that since I'm currently a "Southerner" if only by virtue of living in the South, I should post something Southerners would appreciate...like a video of NASCAR great Jeff Gordon pranking a car salesman.  Enjoy!

Warbird Radio

Hi, guys.  Just wanted to let you know about a recent interview I did with Warbird Radio for The Missionary Position.  You can find it here.  If you've not heard of it, Warbird Radio is a great place to find interviews with people a lot more interesting than me...pilots and other folks who've contributed to history and some of the people who watch over those historical relics (the airplanes, not the people) and legacies we're still lucky enough to have around...and discussions of planes and places that fill our grade school textbooks.  There's plenty of other great stuff too.

My segment is a little more than halfway through the show (Episode 495).  Listen up!

P.S.: In keeping with the interview, here's a cool video from YouTube.  It's one of the best stop-motion sequences I've ever seen. Enjoy.

The Building Blocks of Imagination

There's nothing quite like losing yourself in a good book.  Movies and television can do something similar, but I think they come up short in the "all engrossing" department; that degree of capture that makes you lose your sense of time and place in reality.  I think it's because books force you to engage the stories in them in ways visual media does not.  When you read a book or listen to a story on the radio (or over a campfire, for that matter) you must use your mind to conjure up the images being described.  YOU assign faces and hair colors to the characters as prescribed by the storyteller.  YOU decide how big that "monolithic mountain" is in the story.

I guess what I'm saying is that it is the reader or listener who fills in the gaps and creates the internal visuals that the story takes place in.  The storyteller is the guide, but the story reader or listener is the set designer and director of the movie that is taking place in their own mind.

When you watch a show on the big screen or the boob tube, however, 95% of your mind gets the day off.  You are presented with nearly every facet of the story without having to work for it.  You are given the landscape the director chooses to use as his/her preferred backdrop, and the characters are as they're played by the casted actors.  You as the viewer can neither add nor detract from what's presented.  It requires much less of your brain to process a story in this fashion.  It's kind of a lazy way to get the story and, what is more, we dull our creative muscles by not exercising them collaborating in the creative process.  By virtue of this, our imaginations are dying slow deaths.

Maybe this is why many of the great classics - those stories that have enduring qualities - occurred with greater frequency before movies and television became a mainstay of entertainment.  People's ability to envision, to imagine were greater.  They lived in a day and age when if you wanted a story to entertain yourself with, you either had to listen to it on the radio or read a book to get it.  And before that there were only the oral traditions of storytelling.  People developed their imaginations because they had to if they were to enjoy the full experience of the story.

Technology is great, and it's made for some pretty nifty presentations on the screen.  Stuff that might even seem magical if presented to earlier generations.  But for my money there's still no better way to get a story than by sharing in the creative experience of building that movie in our minds with the help of a good storyteller.

The Last Flight Of Coke Darden's Douglas Dolphin

Ladies and gentlemen, meet the Douglas Dolphin!  I found the below video on YouTube some time ago and can't believe I hadn't posted it sooner.  Anyway, the plane in this video belonged to a man named Coke Darden (a surefire protagonist's name if I've ever heard one), and now resides at the Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola, FL, where it was ultimately retired.

The video provides an extremely rare opportunity to hear and see an actual Douglas Dolphin in flight - the same aircraft flown by Jack Halloway in The Missionary Position - from the interior of the cabin.  Filmed in 1998, the video reflects the quality of the cameras in use back then, but it still provides a good sense of what it was like to be in the Dolphin when landing and taking off from water, the sounds of the hydraulics at work as the gear was retracted and lowered, and the roar of its twin engines when the Dolphin took flight.

A beautiful spectacle to behold if you're into that sort of thing.  So, without further ado, may I present to you "The Last Flight of Coke Darden's Douglas Dolphin."




P.S.:  Many thanks to w4joy for posting and keeping this video going on YouTube!

Counterintuitive pricing

It's been brought to my attention that there may be a demographic of readers who will not chance purchasing books they deem "cheap". Apparently the assumption goes that a book priced too low is priced this way because it is a bad book. The recommendation, therefore, was to bring the price of my book up from the 99 cents I had the eBook version listed for to a more "prestigious" price point.

As those of you who've kept up with my previous blog postings may recall, the reason I priced the book so low in the first place was because this isn't about the money now so much as it is about attracting readers and establishing an audience. I figured a well-priced book would entice readers who have never heard of me to give my book a chance. After all, what's 99 cents, right?

Well, if I'm missing out on potential readers because they think all 99 cent books are crap then those are potential audience members lost. So, for now I'm going to try a slight price increase to see if it affects sales. Considering my limited attempts at marketing so far the book has done modestly well at 99 cents. Time to see if the marketing gurus are correct. I'll give it a few weeks at $1.99 but if I don't see any bump in sales I'm going to go back to my original plan and list it at the 99 cent mark.

Transparency in action.

The best things in life...

...aren't things.

When I look back on life fifty years hence, it's not going to be the big flat screen t.v. in my living room, the number of DVDs in my video library, the nic-nacs cluttering every flat surface in my house, or the watch on my wrist that come to mind. It'll be the friends I've hung from cliffs with, the rush of adrenaline I felt the first time I leapt into the rapids of a wickedly flowing river, the remembrances of flying low over the deserts of the Middle East, of seeing the bedouins with Mercedes SUVs parked outside their tents, the loves and the losses and then finally the look in my wife's eyes when she said "I do" at sunset. I'll remember my motorcycle tour through Europe and those exquisitely seductive roads curving through the French, Swiss and Austrian Alps, the silence of a ship with failed boilers in the middle of the Indian Ocean, the taste of a blood orange on a tortuously hot day in the Gulf and the first time I felt the skyscrapers of New York towering above me. I'll remember my first flight in an airplane and the view of the clouds from their topsides. I'll remember my first taste of a good scotch, the satisfaction of completing my first story, the euphoria after finishing a triathlon and a marathon, and especially the pain I'd feel the day after a marathon. I'll remember the sensation of "floating" through space as I looked into a bottomless abyss SCUBA diving in the Pacific, the jungle waterfalls I rappelled down with friends in Guam, the goosebumps on the back of my neck the first time I felt the true power of the wind at sea, the love of my animals and mine for them, and the loss I felt at their passings. I'll remember the barbecues with my friends and family, the backpacking trips into the backcountry of America, the beers over campfires, and the last moments I've spent with loved ones.

I'll remember a lot of things in life when I'm at the end of mine, but I'll be hard pressed to remember the furniture I had when I was twenty-six, or the clothes I wore when I was thirty-two.

When I look back on life it is those meaningful experiences and interactions that I'll remember most dearly, and not my material possessions. Buying something nice might put a bandaid over whatever void you're feeling in your life for a minute, but bandaids fall off with time. A good experience lasts a lifetime.