Real life dreary Monday post

It’s a good thing Amazon had a bunch of good albums on the $5 rack this month, or I’d be downright homicidal by now. Work sucks right now, but it’s just standard beginning of year evaluation/budget crap that everybody goes through. And I’m down a person because he and the company parted ways last week, so now I begin the hiring process all over again. Sometimes it feels like I’ve been interviewing people constantly for the past two years. But these are the perils of middle management, and since I take the check, I have to take the crap.

On the “take the check” front, January will wrap up as the best sales month to date for my books. As of this morning, I’ve sold the following –

Amazon –

Hard Day’s Knight – 27

Red Dirt Boy – 1

The Chosen – 17

Barnes & Noble (I don’t really believe these figures since they show zero sales since the 15th, but I suppose it’s possible. There have been issues with the BN reporting software).

Hard Day’s Knight – 6

The Chosen – 3

Smashwords- (a couple of these are freebies that I gave to reviewers)

Hard Day’s Knight – 3

The Chosen – 2

I’m not going to get rich on those kind of sales by any stretch, but this shows a 50% increase in sales on Amazon, my primary sales channel, since last month. So let’s extrapolate that a few months and see what it looks like.

January – 45 books – $90

February – 65 books – $130

March – 95 books – $190

April – 190 books – $380

So if I continue on this growth pattern, I might actually be making some significant money by late spring/early summer. Add to that the release of my next book in March, and I’m pretty optimistic about being able to pay for a couple of Vegas trips this year off of selling books, and that would be nice.

A lot of successful indie authors are reporting a point where the switch just flipped and they went from selling a couple dozen books a month to hundreds of books a month seemingly overnight. I’d love to see that happen, but if it doesn’t, it’s no big deal. I’ve written the books, and I’ll keep writing the books. I have faith that if I write to the best of my ability, that the market will find me eventually and my books will sell.

It’s kinda like when I started blogging – create good content and people will eventually find you. So I’m going to write good books, and trust in the marketplace to find me. Of course I’ll still do whatever promotion I can afford, but most of what I’m going to do is write.

Which reminds me, I have to crank out a short story tonight to replace the one I tore into electrons in a fit of frustration last night. I knew where it was going, it was clever, witty and going in exactly the direction I had planned for it. And it was boring as hell. I couldn’t come up with a way to show more than I was telling, so I trashed it. I might go back to it later, but now that I’m on deadline I need to shift gears and knock this bad boy out tonight or tomorrow. I came up with a new plan while I was driving to Atlanta yesterday, so I should be able to jam out 5K words in a night or two.

Alright, enough ramble – go buy a book, my cat needs fed!

Sunday Spotlight – Hollowland

Sunday Spotlight – Hollowland

Authors, if you want to be featured on the Sunday Spotlight – write a great book. If I buy it and read it and agree that it’s a great book, it’ll probably end up here. If you wanna send me a copy of your great book, that’s very cool and I appreciate it. But I’m not going to be a review site, and I’m not promising anything except that once a week I’ll try to write up a book from an independent author that I love. But I won’t turn down gifts – email them to johnhartness AT gmail DOT com.

We’re not going to go into the fact that Amanda Hocking came out of nowhere in 2010 to become a monster best-selling author, all without the backing of any big publishing house or press machine. We’re not going to hold her up as some type of gold standard for independent authors and make her our Joan of Arc for self-publishing. Because frankly, none of that matters. All that matters is that this chick from Minnesota has written some kickass books and you should check them out.

Now a bunch of Hocking’s books are in trilogies, but my favorite book of hers so far is a stand-alone zombie novel called Hollowland. The blurb for Hollowland says “This is the way the world ends – not with a bang or a whimper, but with zombies breaking down the back door.” And from page 1, this book had me by the short hairs and never let go. 19-year-old Remy King only cares about one thing in the world – getting her brother the help he needs. And she will do anything it takes to get Max to safety, from battling hordes of zombies to bands of outlaw scavengers to her own hormones and despair.

Hocking paints a great post-apocalyptic world, with plenty of grit but also the odd ray of hope. Remy tries to be tough as nails, but shows all too often that she’s really a good person underneath. Look, I’m no book critic, I’m just a redneck writer with a fantasy literature itch, and Hollowland scratched that as well as anything I’ve read recently. I loved it as much as I loved The Hunger Games, and it really runs right up the with Ender’s Game, one of my all-time faves. That’s not to say that this book is anything like those, although there are certain dystopian traditions that it shares with The Hunger Games, as well as 1984, We and even the final scenes of E.T.

The plot is tight and fast-paced, and the book kept me up way past my bedtime for more than one night. I even snuck in a little time to read at work, which is a true testament to how much I wanted to know what happened next. The characters are nicely well-rounded, from the shell-shocked rock star to the frightened baby brother to the ass-kicking heroine. I would say this is a great book for teen and preteen girls who are interested in fantasy as horror lit, because it gives them a solid role model instead of the insipid heroines we see in so many TV shows and movies. Remy is definitely more Rambo and Veronica Mars than Bella, and the literary world needs more of that.

Hollowland is a thrill ride of a book, and one that leaves you gasping for breath at the end, feeling fulfilled and still wanting more. I felt like the book ended almost perfectly, but I still wanted a sequel just because I enjoyed the characters so much. So you should go buy it.

For more about Amanda Hocking and her work, go to her blog.

To buy Hollowland for multiple e-readers, including the Kindle, go to Smashwords.

Pot Limit Omahahahahaha

Last week I joined my buddy Jim at a local underground poker room for a Pot Limit Omaha tourney. Now I loves me some Omaha, but I’ve played very little tournament Omaha, or Omadraw as we like to call it. This was a cheap-o rebuy tournament, where your initial buy-in was only $25, with $20 rebuys. Yeah, that always works well for me. I should never, ever play in a cheap rebuy tournament. I should stick to tournaments with one buy-in or $100 or better, because then I care a little more. Or can at least fake it.

I bought in, and did the immediate rebuy to give myself a double stack. Then I shoved it in with bottom set against a made straight and a flush draw, got my full house when the flush hit, and was off to the races. That sounds like the recipe for a big stack, right? Yeah, not so much. I played like complete crap in the rebuy period and fished out a total of $145 out of my pocket before all was said and done. After the rebuy period, people were dropping like flies. The play in this even was pretty spectacularly bad, I’m pretty sure a moderately bright orangutan could have made the final table. And since Jim and I both made the final table, you can judge that for yourself!

I tightened up considerably once we got close to the money, but there was one guy who never shifted gears. He might have been the second-worst player in the whole event, so of course he built a massive stack. There aren’t many things  that I consider to be unforgivable poker sins, but being a calling station is high on the list. This guy not only flat-called with flush draws, he would call with ANY flush draw, no matter how puny and no matter how big the bet. He took half my stack early when I led out with two pair and he was my only caller with a flush draw. He picked up bottom pair on the turn and called me again. The river paired his ace, and I checked behind him. He turned over his runner-runner two pair and started to pseudo-apologize for his play, saying he was on the flush draw. Of course he was on the 10-high flush draw, so not even close to the nuts, but regardless. I looked at him and said “Don’t apologize, you gave me the action I wanted. You called when you were behind, and checked when you pulled ahead. I couldn’t have asked for you to play it any better for me.”

Of course half an hour later he calls my all-in with the nine-high flush draw and bottom pair against my Kings and gets there on the river to send me packing two out of the money. I’ll definitely be back the next time they run that tourney, because there’s a lot of money to be made. I didn’t make enough adjustments once we got to the final table, but with a little tweaking, I feel fairly certain that I can pull down a pile of money out of that tourney.

Omaha is a great game, if you’re not familiar with it, you should check out Full Tilt Poker where you can play poker online for free.

Where were you?

Every generation has one or more of those “Where were you when…?” moments. For my parents there were many – the bomb in Japan, V-E day, V-J Day, Kennedy’s assassination. Those are the same ones for most of my peers’ grandparents, but my folks are older than most. It’s one of those things that people go to when they’ve had that one drink too many and gotten maudlin, or when a song comes on the radio that reminds them of the day, or something.

My generation went a long way without having one. I was born in 1973, and the onslaught of the modern televised news broadcast number a lot of that “where were you when” feeling. It wasn’t enough to just have something happen – it had to be BIG. I was too young to really remember the Iran hostage crisis, but I do remember the yellow ribbons. I was only four when Elvis died, and only seven when John Lennon was shot, so those didn’t have much impact. Until a bunch of assholes flew airplanes into buildings ten years ago, I had only ever had one “Where were you?” moment.

I was in seventh grade, and it was January. It was cold, and it was after lunch, so I was in the middle school auditorium playing Dungeons & Dragons with Billy D. and Bradley. There might have been someone else, too, but I’m sure those two were there. I’m fairly certain that at some point one of the popular girls turned around in her seat in the row ahead of us and called us nerds, which stung, but was unavoidably true. So we were rolling up characters, or rolling attacks, or just generally goofing around, when the intercom box on the wall squawked to life.

The Challenger, the space shuttle carrying seven souls, exploded 73 seconds after liftoff from Florida, killing all aboard. Among the crew was Christa McAuliffe, a teacher selected as part of a national competition. This was to be the first in a series of educators in space, a program that ended with McAuliffe’s death.

I remember the shock, the dismay that I felt. Our country had failed at something. It was a big deal to me, the first time I had known the USA to not be the biggest and best. My twelve-year-old mind didn’t quite comprehend everything that was happening. I had missed Vietnam, and Watergate, and was just beginning to understand the impact those events had on our national consciousness. This was the first time I had seen our country reach for the stars and miss. Shuttle launches were ordinary by 1986, so commonplace that while the TV in the library was on and tuned to the event, it was no longer mandatory viewing for every schoolkid. But then it went wrong, and my perceptions of the world changed.

I don’t remember much about the Reagan presidency, but that night he was the President we needed. Just like George W. Bush, who I have blasted on these pages on more than one occasion, was exactly the President we needed in the days after 9/11. Reagan’s words from that night’s speech, quoted from John Gillespie Magee Jr.’s poem High Flight, were perfect.

Today, 25 years later, I still remember.

“We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and ‘slipped the surly bonds of Earth’ to ‘touch the face of God.'”

Return to Eden, Part 1

This is the first chapter of something new I’m working on. It’s a young adult novel about the end of civilization as we know it. Lemme know what you think.

The day the world ended started off just like every other Thursday. Christin Kinsey got up after the alarm went off for the third time, staggered to the bathroom in her t-shirt and pajama bottoms, went about her morning business, took a shower, brushed her teeth, yelled at her brother Matt to drag his sorry butt out of bed because she wasn’t going to be late on account of him again this week, went back into her room, got dressed in a pair of jean shorts and a Kings of Leon T-shirt she’d borrowed from her boyfriend Kent a week or two ago, and beat on Matt’s door a couple more times before heading downstairs for breakfast.

While Christin was settling in behind a bowl of Lucky Charms and a Coke, her mom was in the kitchen in dress slacks and a bra, ironing a shirt that had obviously spent the night in the dryer and mainlining coffee with CNN on in the background. There was some other big fuss going on somewhere in the world with people that hated Americans shooting Americans, and Americans going in to stop them from shooting too many other people, and some talking heads with French accents whining about the overbearing American policies.

“Mom,” Christin asked between mouthfuls of cereal and marshmallows, “why don’t French people like us?”

“Because all frogs are douchebags” answered Matt, clumping down the stairs in baggy cargo shorts and Doc Marten boots, the uniform of his whole bunch of loser friends.

“Matthew!” Shrieked their mother, putting on her shirt and zipping up her slacks while simultaneously trying to butter a bagel and put away the iron. “We do not use terms like ‘douchebags’ or ‘frogs’ in this house! There are some French people who would rather eat Brie and smoke stinky cigarettes than do what needs to be done in the world, but that’s no reason to condemn the whole country. The French contributed some wonderful things to society,”

“Yeah,” Matt interrupted, “like eating snails and the guillotine.”

“I can think of some times when the guillotine would be useful, muttered Christin.

“Alright you two comedians, get your butts out of here or you’re going to be late. Again.” Their mother hustled them out of the kitchen and thrust some cash into Christin’s hand. “This should get you some gas and cover lunch for both of you. There’s frozen pizza in the fridge for tonight, I’ve got to go to Charlotte for a meeting with the B of A people about the loan.” She had been negotiating with the mortgage demons at Bank of America for months about refinancing their home, and it was, in her words, time for someone to “shit or get off the pot.” Sandra Kinsey didn’t swear often, but more and more often lately when she did, it involved someone with the mortgage company.

Things had been okay when Christin and Matt’s dad had been around, but Jacob Kinsey had died of lung cancer three years ago, and things had gotten tight with all his medical bills. Sandra had mortgaged the house to the hilt to pay off all the doctors and hospitals, but when the housing market in Asheville, NC went into the toilet like it did all over the country, they owed a lot more on the house than it was worth. President Obama’s plans to help American homeowners sounded good on TV, but didn’t always work out so well when reality hit the fan, as Sandra had become increasingly fond of saying. So today she was headed down to Charlotte, and she was determined to come home with some answers, or at least with a pound of flesh from some useless paper-pusher to make her feel better.

Sandra followed her kids out the front door and watched as they piled in Jacob’s old F-100 pickup truck and headed off to school. She’d kept the truck around until Christin had been old enough to drive, then given it to the girl for her sixteenth birthday. Big, blocky and decidedly un-sexy, the truck was nevertheless dependable and certainly better built than anything that had come out of Detroit in the past 30 years. It was a 1965 model, the year Jacob was born, and he had restored it to working order, if not much more than that. So it was a big rolling hunk of steel that Sandra didn’t mind sending her kids off to school in while she headed down the mountains in her Nissan Murano to do battle with the evildoers at the great corporate headquarters.

Christin drove into the parking lot at West Asheville High School, and parked the truck at the far end of the lot, as usual. It didn’t take too many mornings of being mocked by Cindy Monihan and her gaggle of bleached-blonde cheerleaders and wannabes for the Kinseys to decide it was easier to walk a few more steps up to the school each morning than deal with the popular kids. Of course, it didn’t matter where they parked, they still had to run the gauntlet of the beautiful people to get into the school, and that was as fun as your average dentist’s visit.

“Oh look, everyone, the Kinsey twins have decided to grace us with their pollution once again,” announced Cindy, who wielded her new Prius like a weapon against Christin’s gas-guzzling truck.

“Not twins, bimbo, but if you weren’t too vain to wear your glasses you’d see that,” muttered Matt as they walked into the school, heads lowered against the disapproving glances of Cindy’s psuedo-environmentalist friends. They cared about the planet because it was the latest flavor, not because they had any great connection to Mother Earth.

Since Matt had his head down, he never saw the chest he ran into, but it didn’t take anyone nearly as bright as the younger Kinsey to realize that Brian Regan, Cindy’s boyfriend, had heard his mumbled insult.

“What did you say, asswipe?” The much larger boy said to Matt, who had bounced off his chest like a superball.

“I said we’re not twins.”

“What else did you say, butt-munch?” Brian gave Matt a shove, spinning him into another of his friends. By now most of the starting offensive line for the football team had formed a circle around Matt, grinning and handing their letter jackets to their girlfriends just in case there was bleeding.

Matt’s temper flared white-hot, and he lost control of his mouth, as he was wont to do in these, or really any, situations. “I said, if your bimbo girlfriend would put on her glasses once in a while, she could see past the end of her makeup mirror.” Christin groaned quietly, hoping her mother had paid for the health insurance this month, because it looked like Matt was going to be needing another trip to urgent care.

“Hold the little chump,” Brian said to his buddies. They instantly grabbed Matt’s arms, but left his legs alone, which cost Brian dearly when he stepped in to deliver Matt’s punishment. The smaller boy was no football bruiser, but two years of varsity cross country had given him plenty of lower-body muscle, and the kick he landed on Brian’s groin was as good as any field goal the team had made all season. Regan dropped like a sack of well-manicured potatoes, and his buddies relaxed their grip on Matt’s arms just enough for him to wrestle his way free and bolt into the school building, his sister hot on his heels. The first bell was just ringing as they made their way inside, laughing hysterically.

“That was great, little bro. Meet you for lunch?” Christin asked.

“Yeah, if I can avoid the goon squad.” Matt gave his sister a high five and they headed off to their morning classes, for the last time.