<a href="http://theslumsofmediocrity.bandcamp.com/album/direct-lines">Direct Lines by The Slums Of Mediocrity</a> Just recently a digital album was released by a friend of mine on bandcamp.
"Direct Lines" is the 22nd album created by "The Slums of Mediocrity."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZC1lmisGXY
GoshDarnBlog.com 2022.
It is experimental electronic music.
Allan of The Slums of Mediocrity said this about the album he made, "A somewhat live, somewhat improvisational set of songs that came out of my jamming with a touch-pad Korg synth."
It's a calming, collage of harmonies and music soundscapes that you can trip out to on headphones. I highly advise that you take the time to listen to it yourself.
U2 Cover by Slums of Mediocrity and DJ COLA
We made a track together once called "Slave2$." You can listen to that track on BandCamp, too
Jason Werbeloff is a sci-fi and cyberpunk writer living in South Africa. I took the time to catch up with him and ask him questions about Star Trek, the craft of writing and then veered into self-publishing and marketing his books on Amazon. Read on below to find out more about him and his books!
What part of South Africa are you in?
I’m in Johannesburg… We have different types of capitols, but it’s our financial capitol.
When did you start writing your shorts, your novels, your novellas? When did you start writing sci-fi?
I wrote my first book when I was 19. I was in the second year of university and it was a terrible book (laughter) I never did anything with it. I wrote and put it in the drawer.
Really?
Yeah. I think that’s generally good advice is never publish your first novel. What happens, your first novel is generally autobiographical. It wasn’t about me specifically, but there were lots of autobiographical elements and I think for a lot of writers they have to kind of get that out of their system and once that’s out of their system then they can start writing properly, so that novel wasn’t science fiction it was mainstream fiction, literary fiction, and then I wrote my first science fiction book when I was 29.
You don’t think you can re-write that first book and make it into something good, huh?
I had a look at it a few months ago. I called it back up again and I thought maybe I could rework it or massage it into something more useful and it’s just terrible. It’s totally unusable, so no. No. Generally I think one shouldn’t publish your first novel. I mean there are amazing first novelists, debut novelists, I mean they’re some phenomenal debut novels out there, but I think for the most part, there’s a lot of stuff that you have to work through, emotional stuff and writing technique stuff that you have to get through before you can start publishing good literature.
“I’m a philosopher, so I have a PhD in philosophy and what philosophers do a lot of is thought experiments,”
I’m a fiction writer too, so I want to keep talking about this. When you write where do your ideas come from… You said basically auto-biographical doesn’t sound like what you do, so you never put anything in your life in your fiction book to write a story?
I mean I do, but I guess it would be more unconscious than conscious now, so I never write a whole person that I’ve met. They never become a character, but I do take part of a person… If I meet someone or if there’s an important person in my life, they’ll often have a trait, which I’ll use, but I won’t use their entire character, so I won’t replicate them — Look, I’m not sure whether it’s ethical or not to use a whole person, but for me it’s not about the ethics of it. It’s about the creativity. People make great characters, but not as they are. What makes a person a great character in a book is often slightly different from what makes them work as a person in real life. People are not that interesting. I mean they are interesting, but they’re not interesting as they are. Often with a slight change they’re more interesting, so in terms of characters I’ll often use parts of characters and in terms of situations. I’m a philosopher, so I have a PhD in philosophy and what philosophers do a lot of is thought experiments, so we think about what the world would be like if it was exactly as it is now except for one change, so what would it be like “if” and then we fill in those dots, and all my sci-fi stories could be seen as thought experiments, so we take the world as it is and make one change and I think the same applies to characters. You can take characters as they are and make one change and see a very interesting person on the page come alive.
“I love Star Trek…”
What’s your favorite sci-fi movies and sci-fi books? I read a post about how you like “Star Trek Voyager.”
I do. Yeah. I love Star Trek and I’m watching the new Star Trek Discovery as well. Not quite as good as the old Star Treks, but it’s good and it’s going in the right direction I think. Yeah, so I don’t know if you’ve seen Altered Carbon?
No.
It’s a recent series that’s come up on NetFlix. I think they released it about a week or two ago and it’s based on a book by Richard Morgan, by the same name… I actually read the book recently. Reread it. I read it a few years ago and reread it recently, so that genre of fiction was called cyberpunk and there’s a number of great authors in that genre, so Philip K. Dick is just phenomenal. William Gibson, there’s a few very good authors I like to read in cyberpunk.
“I created a whole lot of stories in the universe called the ‘bubble’ and I alliterated all the stories and I’m still writing in the bubble, but I’m popping the bubble and moving off planet.”
Why do you use alliteration in your titles?
I needed something to tie the stories together to indicate to people they are part of the same universe and there’s various ways authors do that. Sometimes they use single word titles. Sometimes they use the same prefix for every story title, so like Star Trek Voyager, Star Trek Discovery, they’ll have Star Trek at the beginning of every title and one way I hadn’t really seen done out there was alliteration, so I started doing that and readers liked it I think, so I’m now done with alliteration. I created a whole lot of stories in the universe called the “bubble” and I alliterated all the stories and I’m still writing in the bubble, but I’m popping the bubble and moving off planet. It’s the same universe just it afterwards and I’m no longer alliterating. I’m using the Star Trek style, mines’ going to be called Star Phase… Does that sound alright to use Star Phase?… I always want feedback on these things.
Yeah.
Okay, cool.
Well, you’re just going to be labeled a “fanboy” that’s all! (laughter)
I suppose. Yeah, I suppose so, which is fine. I don’t mind.
How many words do you write a day?
I don’t write everyday. Firstly I write five days a week and secondly I don’t write every week. I write one month and then another month is editing, so I alternate my months and on months when I’m writing I write between two and 3000 words a day and on months when I’m editing I edit between four and 8000 words a day depending on whether it’s a first edit, second or third, so first edit is a lot more intense… but by the third edit I’m doing six to seven to 8000 words a day.
I’ve tried not with Dragon specifically, but I’ve tried other voice to talk recognition and I’m not very good at it. Maybe I need to persevere. A lot of authors like narrating. I see value in it. It’s fast. I just struggle to enunciate my stories. I feel so much more comfortable writing them…. Do you use that technique?
No. I have a version that hasn’t been opened that a friend gave me because I just don’t like it and i see other people using it and it’s like you have to correct things and that’s enough to make me not want to use it, so it’s really silly that I have a version sitting here that I could use, but I just don’t like it! (laughter)
Some authors swear by it. They love narrating, but I struggle.
I do have a voice recorder that I’ll transcribe like I’m going to transcribe this interview because I’m recording it, so I’ll do that.
The new Dragon can do transcriptions too.
Wow, so I should open it up and look at it basically (laughter) since I own it and then I’ll get back to you on how it works?
Try transcribing this interview and see how, whether it works.
I’m going to ask you some straight up marketing questions because that’s what I like to talk about anyway.
Well, that’s what I do most of the time.
When did you start putting your books on Amazon and self-publishing?
I self-published when I was 29 and I’m now I’m 33… 2013 I started self-publishing and I self-published as I wrote, so with each story that I finished I then self-published it. I didn’t create a backlog and this year I’m doing it a bit differently, so I’m creating a backlog before I publish. I’ve had a period where I haven’t published since October last year and readers are getting a bit impatient, which is difficult…
“Yeah. It’s nice to have readers that are impatient,”
That’s great!
Yeah. It’s nice to have readers that are impatient, that’s true, but I feel a bit guilty about it. What I’m doing is, I’m using a strategy called rapid release, so I’m writing a whole series of books and then releasing them rapidly and that seems to work very well in terms of the algorithms
The Amazon algorithms?
It hits Amazon’s algorithms well. What happens traditionally is that when you publish a book, you hit what’s called the 30 day cliff, so for the first 30 days Amazon promotes your book quite strongly for you. Your keywords get priority over other people with the same keywords if their books are older than 30 days and you get put on to the “hot” new releases list… It’s very good for your book and as soon as you hit day 30 your book falls off this cliff of visibility, Amazon no longer promotes it and suddenly your book’s dead, so there’s a Facebook group run by a guy named Michael Anderle and it’s called “20 books to 50k” … Their ethos is that the best way to market a book is to publish the next one, so they try to write very quickly and release rapidly. Their goal’s one book a month.
Oh my God!
Yeah, so they’re writing one book a month. I’m writing one every two months and I feel like that’s slow, but compared to how fast I used to write it’s a lot faster since I joined the group.
“I’m going to be experimenting with that with the next Star Phase series.”
That’s really interesting… I’ve heard of that. A lot of people try to sell a course “Write a Book in 30 Days,” but recently I heard this great podcast on Joanna Pen and this woman being interviewed said write fast and publish slow, so she goes against what you’re saying…
Well… their strategy is that, because of this 30 day cliff, you must be publishing at least once a month… each new book that you publish advertises your previous book… I can’t do that. I feel like personally I’d burn out if I wrote a book a month and secondly that my brain doesn’t keep up with my hands. I can’t think of ideas fast enough to write them and lastly I need to edit, so I take a month for writing and a month for editing, but I do think if you write fast and you edit and you save up all these books and publish them rapidly one after the other, so that the technique is to publish book one, publish book two two weeks later, publish book three two weeks later and then after that three weeks to a month apart. I think that works really well and I’m going to be experimenting with that with the next Star Phaze series.
How much does it cost you to put a book up on Amazon when you pay for the art work, for the book cover and everything else?
It depends. For short stories I use pre-made covers and those cost me anywhere between twenty and fifty dollars a cover… His website name is goonwrite.com and he’s excellent. You can buy bundles of credits, so he has thousands of pre-made covers… If you buy one cover it’s fifty dollars, but it gets a lot cheaper if you buy a whole bunch… When I’m really stumped for a cover I use an excellent designer called BookFly and he’s just superb. The problem is he has a very long waiting list, so you have to book him out up to a year in advance, so you really got to know what you want and he costs a lot of money… but then there’s middle of the range designers as well that I use like CoverMint. CoverMint costs in the middle between pre-mades and BookFly and that cover will cost about one to 200 dollars a cover. BookFly will cost five to 600 a cover.
Tell me what “Star Phase” is about?
I guess in a way it’s kind of a stock standard idea… that the earth is dying and we’ve to get off planet and it’s about this ship that takes this select group of people off planet, but things are not quite what they seem and they’re some nasty characters on board and some people that shouldn’t be on board and there are some un-likely heroes that are going to save the day.
That’s a great logline! If I was new to your writing what book would you suggest to new readers to read first?
Defragmenting Daniel… It started a universe. It started the bubble and then after that I wrote a bunch of short stories, which I compiled into a book called the Crimson Meniscus and the Crimson Meniscus has all those short stories plus the first book in Defragmenting Daniel, so they could buy that or buy Defragmenting Daniel directly.
So I don’t have any more questions. Is there anything else you want to talk about?
What kind of fiction do you write?
I was told I write magical realism. I have a short story collection that goes all over the place — there’s steampunk, there’s fantasy… When I was grad school I would write a lot of comedy and humor, so I have some stories that have just human elements that are not necessarily anything other than literary… I veered off into genre after grad school because I kept meeting all these people on Amazon and you naturally meet genre people when you venture into Amazon, so I’m pretty open minded.
Right… I have a degree in English Literature as well, so I do understand your initial push to literary fiction. It’s interesting because I think if you look on Amazon you won’t find magical realism as a genre.
That’s funny.
I don’t think it’s a category listed. It would probably fall under urban fantasy or under literary fiction.
Well, that’s great you’re helping me with marketing! That’s awesome!
Sure, sure. Look, I’m not an expert on this. I haven’t tried to market a magical realist book, but I haven’t seen it as a category. Also, if you have a strong female protagonist it might be considered women’s fiction or if you got a strong male protagonist it might be considered men’s fiction… It’s always difficult to market your books if you’re writing multiple genres. I write in a combination of genres which makes it difficult,
What are they all?
They combine all these elements… thriller, science fiction and horror and that makes it difficult because when I try to market to horror people they aren’t familiar with the sci-fi elements. When I try to market to sci-fi people they are not really familiar with the horror elements, so it can be difficult.
I spent about a year learning how to upload my own creative writing to Amazon and one day I realized I was finally ready to get my hands dirty and join the revolution myself.
There was one problem though. I had everything ready to go, but the book covers.
I happened upon a group I discovered at Meetup.com and it was mainly about how to put you book on Amazon. The consensus was you needed about w $500 dollars to pay an illustrator to get a book cover done..
The book cover seems to be most important aspect to self-publishing your e-book. It’s one of the main deciding factors on whether someone will buy it.
I was short on cash, so I spent some time scratching my head about this problem.
I decided, since I didn’t have a novel done, I’d put some short stories up that I’d finished. They were only fifteen to twenty pages each, but it would help me get my feet wet with the KDP Select program on Amazon. (You can check out my short stories on Amazon by clicking here!).
First I used KDP Select’s own eBook cover creator. It was real easy to use and the covers I made, in the early stages, didn’t look too bad.
But low and behold I discovered something totally better ! I found Derek Murphy’s website www.diybookcovers.com, and downloaded free templates.
Who’s this Derek Murphy character? you’re probably wondering.
Well, he’s a book cover designer and author among many other things. On his website he says :
“I believe the purpose of our lives is to create something unique that entertains, instructs, challenges or helps others. . . More specifically, I help authors and artists produce, promote, and sell more books and paintings.”
Derek has made gorgeous covers for literally hundreds of self-published, indie authors, but when you read about him on his website the most interesting thing he says is that he wants to buy a castle one day. Cool!
So I started working with the free templates in Microsoft Word software. I have Microsoft 2007, so this or higher is recommended.
If you’re used to using Microsoft Word you will have no problem working on the templates. If you need help learning Microsoft Word 2007 you should watch Derek’s videos or search Google and YouTube for instructions. You can read my article about how to use Google and YouTube here.
Once inside the template I added my own image and then typed in my title and name on top.
Then I was done!
That's how helpful Derek's videos were. I also suggest you check out his books for sale on Amazon.
I highly suggest you visit Derek’s website to learn about making book covers on your own. It’s a great resource!
Now that you’ve read my blog post would you like to buy my e-book for 99 cents? Click here to read my short story collection on Amazon!
I guess all the bloggers got tired of talking about positivity, but crying is good for you, too.
But I still don’t know why crying needs to be advertised.
If this “hot,” “new” subject interests you I can tell you a lot about crying .
I did a lot of it through the years until I decided to stop and try other things.
It might’ve just been “growing pains,” but mostly it was over girls.
A long time ago I read a statistic that the #1 profession for depression was being a poet.
I won first place in a poetry contest when I graduated from college.
One time I told a therapist I cried alone by myself, when I woke up in the morning, in the shower… She told me I shouldn’t be crying like that because it meant I was unhappy.
I don’t do that anymore, but I still don’t feel “happy.”
A week or two ago I read one of the richest men in the world said money doesn’t make you happy in a headline.
He would know since he’s rich!
I don’t know if he should be talking out loud in public, honestly, since he’s going to make everyone who’s not rich hate him!
Apparently you have to “do” or “experience” something to feel happy.
Fruits and vegetables mixed up in a blender or juicer can help you feel happier.
Exercise will help you feel happier if you can make yourself go to the gym.
Talk to someone who cares about you and go on a walk together.
I remember times when friends told me to cry and sometimes I did and sometimes I didn’t because I thought it was funny they were being so serious for some reason.
I’m a man.
I cry at movies.
I remember once my dad found me crying in my bedroom.
I was trying to write a screenplay about a girl who broke my heart and I started crying.
My dad arrived home, ran up the stairs, and held me. He told me that the girl was just a “doll.”
I still don’t know what he meant by that, but we all got slang we like to use.
Maybe he meant she wasn’t real, so there was nothing to cry about.
“If this is a mental health emergency call 911.”
This is what every psychiatrist’s machine says when you leave a message.
Most of the time when I’ve made an effort to see a shrink it was over a girl.
Instead of exercising, juicing and talking to friends I laid around in my bed in the fetal position.
If you can help it… don’t do that.
It’s a waste of time. Really.
There are people out there who will be nice to you if you look for them.
Ultimately, we are human and crying will always be a trend.
It won’t go away.
Those blog posts shoved into our faces on our web browsers.
Stupid.
But don’t worry.
Those bloggers will start blogging about a new subject soon.
If you like reading my blog posts consider buying through the links in them. I’m an affiliate at Amazon and will get a commission if you choose to buy through it. Thanks!
If you purchase through our partner links, we get paid for the referral at no additional cost to you! Visit our disclosure page.
GoshDarnBlog.com 2022.
Which Juicer should you buy?
Haven’t you seen those YouTube videos where aliens are warning us that all the food we eat is poison?
But seriously, fruits and vegetables are healthier than fast food and everyone knows this logic, but rarely do we practice it.
pPlus, there’s no limit to the amount of information there is to becoming healthy online. How do you sift through it?
Not too long ago I saw a great documentary, through my Amazon Prime account, that showed how people get amazing benefits from juicing and cleansing for long periods of time.
I felt like I could see more clearly, breathe better, had more energy
Then the only reason I stopped juicing was because I got tired of not having the sensation of putting food into my mouth to chew. Lame but true.
After a day or two juicing I didn’t feel hungry and I kept doing normal daily things. Like at the time I was DJ-ing at night and there was no problem. I had energy.
The only thing that sucks about juicing is cleaning the machine
Today I’m drinking cucumber, kale, ginger, and apples — all juiced in my machine. If the apples are small enough you can put the whole apple in this particular juicer I have.
It’s the New Year (at the time of this writing), so maybe this is something you’re interested in starting for your health routine.
Disclaimer: Go see a doctor if you have health concerns and ask them if you should start juicing. Do your own due diligence. Lotza Marketing, LLC and Evan Hundhausen are not making any health claims and are not responsible for anything. It is understood that this writing is for entertainment and educational purposes only.
Amazon owns everything so why not your TV, too? GoshDarnBlog.com 2022.
In the town where I live there is a Whole Foods, owned by Amazon, and Google literally built a huge HQ office across the street from it, so if you’re wondering who owns the world… think no further.
Ultimately, with the Amazon Fire Stick, your TV turns into a movie and app super-station and it’s a fun time!
You can literally talk into the microphone inside the remote and say like “Jean-Claude Van Damme” and you will get a list of all things JVCD like Jean-Claude Van Johnson, a new comedy on Amazon Prime.
You can buy lots of movies if you want or you can sign up and pay around ten bucks a month for Amazon Prime. The selection is not bad and they have original programming. Plus you get free shipping and discounts when you shop on Amazon.
It’s easy to see this is much cheaper than cable, like if you subscribed to just Amazon Prime and Netflix that would be around 20 bucks a month. There is an initial fee of 39 bucks to buy the physical TV fire stick set-up. It works over your wi-fi internet connection.
The only real problem with the Fire Stick and Amazon Prime is you sometimes pull up these awful movies made by amateurs (like when you pull up crappy books with bad reviews on Kindle). It’s a free-for-all, so if you’ve made a movie, by all means go upload it on Amazon Prime so I can watch it!
You should know when you turn on your TV and then press your Fire Stick button the movie you paused from the night before will start running instantly from where you left off. Convenient.
If you like games you can download them, but you have to buy a joystick to play some of those. Some can be played on your Fire Stick remote though.
You can also search the web through an app but it is cumbersome typing in website addresses, so you may need a keyboard.
If you haven’t gotten the Fire Stick yet you should consider buying it today to enjoy all the movies!
Like my blog post about how amazon owns everything so why not your TV, too?
Then consider buying through the links in them.
I’m an affiliate at Amazon and will get a commission if you choose to buy through it. Thanks!
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