Disappeared for a While

"Well... I'm back."

The immortal words of Samwise to close out The Lord of the Rings.  It seems those are my constant words here on Blogger as I swing between intending to continue blogging and wanting to give it up.

To be honest, I would rather leave blogging behind as I'd rather be writing my books rather than talking about them.  I believe that the main reason a lot of people don't fulfill their dreams of writing is because they're so busy doing everything around it rather than doing the writing itself.  Blogging is one of those distractions.

However, it is good to tell people about what's going on and provide behind the scenes looks, so here I am once again.  (Plus, it seems that there are a few more people reading my blogs now, so here you go.)

My time during Covid has been used intensely to get through projects and release them.  Millions of people out there have been captive audiences for a while, so there will never be a better time to provide entertainment.

As such, I've made more videos for Bandwagon Games, started a podcast for RPG Storytime, finished my book on Vietnam, gotten most of the way through the latest Relic Worlds book, and built a little studio in which to do everything.

I'm going to be posting about all of this over the next few weeks, so I hope you enjoy it.  Take a look at the links and you'll see the results of all my hard labor.

Enjoy!

Writing While Holding a Job

In LA, when someone asks what you do, you either tell them about the job you do to pay the rent, or the job you do as your passion. I love writing. That's my job. Unfortunately, it's not the job that pays the rent. I guess that makes it my "passion job." There are some people who pay their rent with their writing work. Most of them write things they don't care as much about; that's why they're able to make a living at it. They're more malleable because it doesn't mean much to them, so they're able to do the work that needs to be done. There are others who get to make money writing what they really love. Those people are called the luckiest people on Earth. The rest of us need to find some sort of work that pays the rent, allows us to live a life, and doesn't get too much in the way of our writing. For me that's been transcribing. The main thing about transcribing that gives me the freedom to write is that I can do it at home. I get up, go to my computer, transcribe, then I switch over to my writing without much effort. No hour-long commute, and I don't get so exhausted at work that I can't write. Also, I can travel and still work from wherever I am; so when I want to write in another area where I'll get more inspired for the specific story I'm writing, I can do that. I'll be writing a very personal story this August in Nebraska this year. I don't believe I could write this story anywhere but Nebraska. Having my transcription job allows me to continue doing my day job while I do my passion job where I need to do it. The down side is that, as a transcriber, I'm at the mercy of the industry. sometimes it slows down and we have no work. At the time of this writing, for instance, we've hardly had any work for seven weeks. Without my girlfriend supporting us right now, I'm not sure how I'd pay rent, let alone take care of other bills. However, had I planned better during the months when it was busy, I could have done more work and made more money. So it can pay off if you do a better job than I have planning. Plus, while a lot of my books don't do great, some of them make a little bit of money. So I often let their profits pile up on their bank account until these desperate times in which I withdraw them to carry me through these rough patches. Thus the life of a writer.

Had an Interesting Interview with Reels

I had a nice interview regarding my book Pro Bono with the Reels channel. They're doing a series of episodes around movies that were based on true stories. The idea in this episode is that Natural Born Killers was based on the story of Starkweather and Fugate.

This is actually not true, as even Oliver Stone said it was inspired by Bonnie and Clyde, and the tale has no similarities whatsoever to the Starkweather-Fugate story. However, we were able to essentially debunk the myth, and tell some true information about the story.

The show is called The Shocking Truth, and it will be on in the spring.