Author: admin (Page 40 of 51)

Winter is one of the most difficult times of year for most people. January is apparently the most depressing month and it’s often cold and people are lonely.

As a creative person these things are often felt even more keenly. It’s hard to write, paint or make anything. If we weren’t lonely at Christmas we’re probably so over loaded with socialness we just want to hide under the duvet and if we were lonely we feel sad and want to hide under the duvet. If it snows and draws us out of our cozy shell we might go gaze on the crisp beauty of it for a few moments before feeling too cold and going back to the duvet.

I had a thought about some of the thigns I’ve done to get me through the bleakness of winter.

Firstly my favourite bevarage, hot chocolate. Most people diet in January. I don’t. Why should I add to the misery of the month by stopping eating my favourite things. Dieting is best saved for march when spring is coming and new beginnings actually feel like new beginnings.

Secondly, well planned socialness. It solves both of the duvet problems. If you have commitments you made before Christmas (not too many) then you have to leave the duvet to see people and if you were lonely it means you feel a little less lonely.

Thirdly, artistic planning days. I often use January to sit down with other creatives and talk about all the creative things I want to get up to in the year. Swapping ideas and inputting into other peoples can be a great way to get excited about actually making something. Half of it you’ll not manage to do or will be forgotten about two weeks later but that’s not the point. Talking to soemone on your wavelength about art is a great booster back into working (if you’re not an artist getting together with someone in your line of work seems to help as well).

Fourthly, small daily goals. I know organisation isn’t a strong point for creatvies but I’ve found if i’m really discouraged a few days or a week or two of easily met goals give me enough satisfaction that I can start to look at bigger tasks again. I often find short stories are good to write at this time of year. They are so much quicker.

If anyone else has any tips for keeping going until Spring arrives please share them below in comments and I hope the ones I’ve suggested do some good.

Jim Murdoch has kindly agreed to be my first interview of the new year so here it is.

Tell us about your latest project.

At the moment all my time is being taken up with promotion of an ebook entitled The Whole Truth, an omnibus edition of my first two paperbacks, Living with the Truth and Stranger than Fiction. Here’s the basic blurb:

Jonathan Payne is a jaded bookseller at the end of a wasted life which has been spent in a dull north England seaside town. He could be an everyman, but seems to have missed the boat somewhere. He’s both distastefully pathetic and oddly sympathetic. A passive character, he has been happy to read about life without experiencing either great joy or great despair. If Death were to knock on his door it wouldn’t trouble him greatly.

The knock comes. Only it’s not Death. It’s the truth. Literally. The human personification of truth.

Truth proves to be a likeable, if infuriating, character with a novel mode of expression: “glib dipped in eloquence and then rolled in a coating of irony,” to quote one reviewer. He knows everything and has no qualms revealing intimate details of lives of the people who cross his path while he’s with Jonathan. He’s quite indiscriminate. The same reviewer described him as “one of the most endearing antagonists I have come across.” Comparisons with Peter Cook’s devil in Bedazzled are not unreasonable.

Jonathan learns what he’s missed out on in life, what other people think and the true nature of the universe which is nothing like he would have expected it to be. At the end, having learned far more than he ever wanted to know, he finds out that it’s usually never too late to start again. Only sometimes it is: no Ebenezer Scrooge or George Bailey-esque turnaround for poor Jonathan.

I also have the paperback edition of my fourth novel, Milligan and Murphy coming out before the end of the year so I’ll need to start promoting that too soon. It’s a novel based on the writings of Samuel Beckett, specifically his novel Mercier and Camier.

What’s your favourite genre to write and what’s your favourite genre to read?

I don’t consider myself a genre writer, in fact in my naiveté I assumed that most writers weren’t. It’s only since I’ve been online that I’ve realised how mistaken I was. Until I started reviewing books on my blog I read twentieth century literary novels almost exclusively – during my twenties I went through a phase of only reading books by Nobel Prize winners. My aspirations were always to be a literary novelist which meant punching above my weight, especially at the start, but my third and fourth novels definitely fit the bill. Not so sure about the fifth.

The first two books are really unclassifiable however this quote from the author Kay Sexton talking about the first novel probably nails it:

“[T]his is one of those novels that bookshops must hate: not ‘hard’ enough to be spec fic, not ‘weird’ enough to be fantasy, too realistic for the humour section and yet too humorous to shelve easily with the lit fic. And that, I suspect is going to prove to be its charm; for those who do read it, it’s a singular take on the world, and it will either resonate with you or leave you cold. […] But I can recommend that you try it — if you like distinctive fiction that rings no bells and blows no whistles but creeps up on you with its absurdities, this book will satisfy you, as it did me.”

She did slightly better with the sequel:

“I tried to come up with one of those pithy one-liners that you are supposed to use to encapsulate a project for the movie industry (which is popularly supposed not to be able to cope with more than a sentence of information at a time) and what I decided on was Alan Bennett meets Douglas Adams! […] I loved it.”

When and why did you start writing?

I didn’t write when I was very young. Apart from one poem, in Scots, when I must have been about eight. It was about a public hanging of all things. I have no idea where that came from but I’m afraid I don’t have a copy so I can’t give you a taster. During my primary school years the poetry that we concentrated on was in the Romantic tradition, sometimes with and sometimes without the capital r, the likes of Robert Burns, Robert Louis Stevenson, Wordsworth, Walter de la Mare, John Masefield. But when I moved to secondary school (I’d be about twelve at the time) I started submitting poems to the school magazine and every year I would get a handful published. It was here that I was first exposed to poetry that wasn’t quite so pretty, specifically the war poetry of Wilfred Owen, but the real change for me came when I was sitting in a cold classroom on a dreich Tuesday afternoon. Our teacher handed out roneoed copies of Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Mr. Bleaney’. We groaned en masse but as she started to open up the poem I found myself captivated. There were no similes, no metaphors, no alliteration, no onomatopoeia, no babbling brooks, no blokes sitting in fields full of daisies. Suddenly I realised what poetry was; all the rest was window-dressing and for the next twenty years I wrote poetry almost exclusively. It wasn’t until I was in my mid-thirties and in crisis that I thought to try something else. And that something else proved to be two novels written back-to-back in about three months.

Why do I write? That’s like asking me why I breathe. In 1997 I wrote this poem:

The Art of Breathing

To find room for the new
you have to let go of
the old

so to learn how to write
I had to forget how
to breathe

and for a time I thought
I had to write to keep
breathing

which makes such perfect sense
but only if you’re a
poet.

20 November 1997

I believe that the need to be creative is something natural, something we all have. Some people paint, some write music, others dance or crochet and others write. I define a writer as a person whose natural response to life is to write about it. I didn’t discover that need until I passed puberty but then that’s often the time when we start to come into our own as rounded individuals. I don’t write to tell stories, to entertain. I’m not interested in making a name for myself. If I found myself alone on a desert island I’d still write.

I no longer draw any distinctions between the kinds of writing I do. The material dictates the form. I began as a poet but poetry, at least the poetry that I find myself capable of writing, has its limitations. Since I completed those first two novels I’ve written another three, two plays, a ton of short stories and I’ve even dabbled with flash fiction. But in my heart of hearts I’m still a poet before anything else.

Have you released any of your poetry to the public?

I’ve only published one poetry book, This Is Not About What You Think. It’s a collection of poetry covering just over thirty years arranged in such a way that it moves from poems about childhood through to old age, a sort of seven ages of man. You can read the whole of the first section of the book on my website here along with some other poems. There are some audio and video readings here and in the right hand column of my blog there is a list of poems and stories available online that I update whenever anything new goes up anywhere.

What’s your perfect writing day like?

Being a writer these days is far harder than it used to be especially if you’re foolhardy enough to go it alone. Yes, it’s a great time to be a writer because getting into print has never been easier, but being read has never been harder for a lot of reasons. Even those who have written something that they’ve managed to get accepted by a traditional publisher are not immune and only the big names like Thomas Pynchon and Cormac McCarthy can afford to keep their distance from their adoring fans. The rest of us have to roll our sleeves up and wade out into the social networks and try to get noticed. I could be writing now but instead I’m doing this interview, my second today as it happens. Not that I’m complaining. As long as the questions are interesting I’m happy to prattle on about my writing all day long but while I’m doing that I’m not doing any new writing. So my perfect writing day would simple be to write and not have to worry about checking my inbox or Facebook or making sure that I’ve responded to all the comments on my blog or kept up with the books I have committed to review. It would be nice just to get up and have nothing to do bar write. I’ve written two lengthy blog posts about this recently, one on boredom and the other on intuition, but the thing that comes out of both of them is that a writer really needs space to be creative, literally time to be bored and when was the last time you could afford that luxury?

What’s one piece of advice you could give to other writers in this new day and age of self publishing and ebooks?

Be professional. I used to be an IT trainer a good few years back. One of my trainees once she’d finished her qualification used to help me out preparing assessment materials. She was keen and efficient but sloppy. The thing is, whenever I pointed out her mistakes, her response was always the same, “It’ll do. Give me something else.” Er, no, it wouldn’t do and I always ended up fixing her work before I could use it. Never take an “it’ll do” attitude towards any aspect of your work. Perfection is unattainable – don’t go the other way – but never settle; if it’s not good enough and you know it’s not good enough do something about it before it gets pointed out to you.

What are you planning on doing next? What else are you up to?

I’m not a big planner. Not as far as the writing goes. I know what books I’m planning to release next – after Milligan and Murphy I’m aiming to put out a collection of short stories near the end of 2012 called Making Sense – and I know what books I have to read and review before the end of the year but as for what I’m going to write next I’m just allowing nature to take its course. I have an idea that I can’t seem to be able to rid myself of but I have no clue if I’m up to the task in hand. Like most of my books I have no story but that’s not so weird: the film director Mike Leigh never starts out with a script, just a concept, and Harold Pinter would often begin with just a voice in his head – no context and maybe not even a gender – and that would be his jumping off point. I get that. When I got the idea that blossomed into Milligan and Murphy I had just crossed the St Andrews Suspension Bridge in Glasgow when I heard the words, “Milligan and Murphy were brothers,” and the rest, as they say, is history. So I’m in no rush to start my next novel or whatever it turns out to be. I’ll be living with it for a good three years – prolific I am not – and that’s a long time to be stuck flogging a dead horse. No, I’ll know when the time is right. It’s only nine months since I completed Left, my last novel.

You can find Jim’s books at the links below:

FV Books
Smashwords

If you want to find out more info about Jim himself you can check out his blog, website or follow him on either twitter or facebook.

Last Month

Mostly December was a wind down from Nano in november. I didn’t really write that much fresh stuff but did my book launch mid December.

• Prepared Innocent Hearts for publication.
• Hand wrote approx 1k words.
• Typed approx 15k words including emails and blogs.
• Sent approx 50 emails.

Not the most productive of months but I only really worked two weeks of it and then had days off to help a  friend with wedding plans and then with the book launch and Christmas I was very very busy.

This Month I plan to get Sherdan’s Prophecy finished in first draft and then plot out my 4th book. I also want to get my second book edited up and start planning the ebook and cover for it.

This Year I’d like to write more than the 150k approximately I wrote in fresh material last year. I’d like to have two more novels published in both ebook and print as well as another short story. I also want to keep the blog going. Now it’s been running 10 months I’m quite determined to keep it running all year as well.

Hope everyone enjoyed the partying.

Sherdan paced as he listened to the radio chatter. His men were closing in on the woman but so far she had still not been captured. He had watched her dive out of shot when she had obviously heard the approaching guards but there wasn’t a camera in the room she had sought refuge in.

He sighed with relief when he heard the patrol’s report of her capture and demanded her brought to him.

“I want to know how she might have got in and have it prevented from ever happening again,” Sherdan yelled at the room. He went to his retreat and poured himself a brandy.

Glaring at the opposite wall, he waited for her to be brought before him. He was furious, both that the woman had eluded capture for so long and that she had somehow gained access to his facility in the first place. He wasn’t going to let her see his anger, however, as the last thing he wanted to let an enemy know was how well they had managed to pursue their goal.

For someone who appeared very under-prepared to overcome his defences she had got a long way into his compound. He knew his men were well trained.

While thinking this over Sherdan picked up a report he had left on the coffee table earlier and flicked to half-way through. He retrieved his favourite pen from it’s usual place and pretended to be making notes on the document as if it were of great importance.

This was how he looked a few minutes later when the patrol knocked on the far door. Sherdan bid them enter and watched, pen and paper still in hand, as the woman who had interrupted his evenings relaxation was marched into the room.

She shivered and waited with the black bag over her head. He briefly admired her figure. The skin-tight stretchy fabric of her top made full use of her athletic shape. The tips of her blond hair poked out of the bottom of the black bag which Sherdan finally let the men remove.

Anya blinked several times and squinted at him. Her shivering had stopped but she didn’t say a word and appeared to be calm in every other respect.

“Who are you?” Sherdan asked, breaking the silence. The four guards all stood waiting for their next commands.

“Who I am isn’t important,” she replied. He was impressed by her well spoken accent. There was a hint of the Somerset lilt in her voice but it was mostly as upper-class as his own accent.

“I do think it’s important and I need you to tell me.”

“Why I am here is more important.” She stepped towards him. “Are you Sherdan Harper?” He nodded but didn’t speak.

“Then I would like to see the prophecy you have.”

Sherdan blinked, but it was the only outward sign of shock he gave. No one but Dr Hitchin and himself knew about the prophecy.

“My church have sent me to read it if you’ll allow it. We don’t think it’s wise of you to make plans for the end of the world and not include Christians, I mean it’s partly a Christian concept.”

Sherdan didn’t respond to this at first. The guards were all listening intently and he didn’t want them to know about the prophecy at all.

This girl, who refused to tell him her name, knew something she couldn’t possibly know. Yet all he knew about her was that she definitely wasn’t part of his program.

“I’m afraid you are very much mistaken about any kind of prophecy. I am not Christian and do not believe in any end of the world stories. Now if you don’t tell me your name and why you are really here I will have to resort to some less pleasant methods to find out the answers I want.”

“I can’t tell you my name and I have already said why I am here,” she replied without hesitating. It was like his threat had not been taken in at all. He didn’t really think she was lying but she obviously did not realise the level of danger she was in.

Sherdan couldn’t do anything to protect her without raising more suspicions from the already curious guards. He had no choice but to hand her over to his interrogation team. If she was as smart as she appeared to be by sneaking so far into his facility she would make up something much more plausible and give him something to work with.

“Take her away and interrogate her,” he said to the nearest man. Sherdan didn’t look at her but went straight back to his document and fake notes. They put the bag back over her face and removed her from both the room and his presence.

As soon as she was gone he shivered and decided to see if Hitchin was awake. They needed to talk. Sherdan needed a rational explanation for how she knew about the prophecy.

He left his refuge and made his way to Hitchin’s laboratory. If he was still up and about he would be working.

On his way Sherdan passed the exact spot where the girl had been captured but he didn’t note anything of importance. It astonished him how close to him she had come. She had to know something more than she was saying.

Hitchin wasn’t asleep yet and was checking something in his microscope in his lab and greeted Sherdan enthusiastically.

“Hello, Hitchin, how are you today?”

“Not bad, thank you. How are you though? You look like a bear with a sore head.” Hitchin looked at Sherdan over the top of his glasses and waved him towards a stool. Sherdan didn’t sit down.

“Not great. We just had a break in. I don’t think anyone but the security teams noticed but nonetheless we’ve had someone get past your defences.”

I assume they didn’t get far?” Hitchin seemed totally unphased by this news.

“They got further than I’d have liked but most worryingly they knew about the prophecy. They asked to see it. I denied it’s existence of course.”

“Of course, a wise move. Let’s face it, most cults have something prophetic they follow. He could have been any old crackpot who heard of us.”

“You didn’t tell anyone about the prophecy then?” Sherdan looked piercingly at Hitchin.

“Of course not. There is only one time I’ve mentioned it to anyone and it was only when I wrote it down and gave it to you. You have the only copy.” Hitchin didn’t look away or even blink.

Sherdan sat down and sighed. Hitchin didn’t hesitate in pouring them both a drink. Sherdan didn’t refuse the gesture nor when he was poured another straight after downing the first.

They continued to drink for several hours while Hitchin steered the conversation away from the intruder and everything else to do with her. Sherdan didn’t even correct him that it was a female rather than the male Hitchin had assumed it was.

When Sherdan finally left to go to his house and get some sleep they were laughing over the day they had first started their program. Sherdan himself had been the first subject, followed by Hitchin. Those had been good days.

It wasn’t until the walk back through the underground route to his house that Anya invaded Sherdan’s thoughts again. Normally he could forget about anyone not in his program with ease but something about her unsettled him.

When he arrived back in his study he went to pour a final brandy before sleeping. The fire had pretty much died down in the three hours since he had left it. He didn’t bother rebuilding it.

Instead Sherdan took his nightcap to his desk. As he did he noticed that one of the monitors was showing the footage from the intruder’s cell. He moved the channel to his larger central screen and sat down. The guards had wasted no time in starting the interrogation process.

While he sat watching the guard yanked her up from her chair by nothing but her hair. He yelled in her face as she remained impassive and non-responsive. Sherdan was impressed that she could remain as calm in the face of such abuse.

When the guard still did not get the information he wanted he gave her a right hook into the face. She went flying back over the chair she had been sitting on and landed on her shoulders. The table mostly covered her body from Sherdan’s view but he winced regardless. That must have hurt.

As the guard lashed out and kicked the girl in the side Sherdan reached out and switched the TV screen off. He couldn’t watch that right before sleeping. It usually wouldn’t have bothered him at all, but either the alcohol or something else had made him more sensitive to this females suffering.

Sherdan finished his drink and went to his bedroom. He sank into the warmth of the duvet and looked around his comfortable yet large room. He had insisted it be constructed in the image of the upper-class bedrooms of the early nineteenth century and contained a four poster bed with an oak panelled effect on the walls up to just over half way. The rest of the walls were a deep burgundy colour.

The fire his maid had lit was still reasonably well fed. Sherdan turned the last of the electric lights out to fall asleep in the cosy glow cast by the blaze from one side of the bed.

It was Sherdan’s alarm that woke him the following morning. The room was still dark and cold. His head hurt from the alcohol the night before and he didn’t want to get up. He knew he had to.

He had three meetings in the morning and needed to write some notes for a press conference the following day and would need to be very careful with what he said. Thankfully he had been given a list of probable questions his interviewer would ask. That was something he could plan for.

As usual his breakfast was laid out in his dining room. He helped himself to a small amount of scrambled eggs and bacon before turning to the selection of fruit. He didn’t like to eat a lot before a big day. It made it harder to think.

While eating he briefly flicked through the paper but nothing of interest caught his attention. He didn’t need advice on what to do with his last week before Christmas and he really didn’t need to know that yet another celebrities’ husband had been caught sleeping with some easy blonde. If they were stupid enough to get caught they should pay the price.

When he had finished he got up and went through to his study. He immediately noticed the central monitor and couldn’t help but turn it on again. The table and chairs were gone and in it’s place a bucket of water.

The girl was drenched and kneeling in front of the water. Her hands and feet were manacled behind her to the same metal hoop in the floor. Both her tattered clothes as well as the floor around her were splattered with her blood.

Thankfully the guards were no where to be seen but she sat, her lips moving even though there was no one to listen to anything she said. Her eyes were closed but he suspected that her right was swollen shut anyway.

For a moment he desired to rush into the room, undo her bonds and carry her to safety. He soon reminded himself that she had brought this upon herself. He would be kinder to her when she finally talked, if she hadn’t already.

While Sherdan watched her captors came back. She didn’t even stop talking or acknowledge their presence in the room. She continued her kneeling; ceaseless murmuring with her eyes closed. Sherdan wished he had installed a sound feed to satisfy his curiosity over what he assumed to be praying.

It was possibly just rambling as a result of what she was going through but she had already informed him of her faith. He wished to know which it was as it appeared to be helping her.

She didn’t stop speaking until one guard grabbed her, shoved her head into the bucket of water and held her there while she struggled against him. As soon as she was let up she coughed and spluttered and went straight back to her ritual.

Sherdan watched this happen another three time before he was interrupted. The security guard who had spoken to him the night before was back.

The time it wasn’t bad news but his agenda and several different reports, including the weekly report on base security. Without the girls addition to the report it was otherwise a very healthy break down. Any other security issues had been dealt with so effectively that he was impressed with the guards.

“Is there no update on information the girl has divulged yet?” Sherdan asked when he noticed the missing report.

“No, Sir. They’ve not got her to speak yet.”

“I guess they took a break to sleep.”

“No, Sir, they’ve been trying all night. She’s one tough chick. She just keeps talking in this language no one understands and ignores almost everything they try and do.”

“Ignores it?” Sherdan looked pale but he tried not to let his guard see how moved he was.

“Yes, she feels the pain for sure. She flinches and cries out occasionally, but she carries on talking right after. Me and Matthew have never seen anything like it.”

“Thank you Nathan. Have me informed as soon as she does say something and get them to feed her. We’ll need to keep her alive until she talks.”

“Yes, Sir.” The guard saluted Sherdan and left. Sherdan looked back at the screen. They had given up on the water and each held an electric baton. He felt sick just knowing what would come next. Reaching out, he switched the monitor off again. He hoped she’d talk soon.

 

For previous chapters and more info check out the Sherdan’s Prophecy book page here. Chapter 4 will be blogged next year. Have a good new year’s eve everyone and I hope you have a great start to the new year.

Hanna is a film I’ve already seen twice in a very short space of time. I loved the main actress, who’s name I can never spell or say, Saoirse Ronan, from City of Ember and Atonement. I wasn’t dissapointed with her in this film either.

The plot was unique enough that it held my interest all the movie. It had a fairytale style storyline combined with the action of well trained assasins. In principle the idea sounds absurd but it was actually very well executed. The two blended together for a very special plot.

Hanna is a gorgeous character. Naieve yet intelligent, young yet wise and curious and cautious. So many amazing oxymorons rolled into one person. She had me lauchung at her and feeling sorry for her almost simulataneously.

I couldn’t fail to love such a film of opposites and the actress did a superb job of her acting. She is an amazingly talented actress, especially for her age.

This was also the first film I’ve seen where Cate Blanchet played the villian. Her acting continued her run of good performances. She was so evil and acted so well I couldn’t decide whether I liked or loathed her.

For action fans I’d highly recommend this film. It’s cutely packed with fights and many other action moments. On top of that the Chemical Brothers did an amazing job at the soundtrack.

As I mentioned yesterday my new ebook is out, Innocent Hearts. It’s two short stories of the fantasy genre and two brief blurbs for each story are near the bottom of the blog.

The reason I’ve written this blog is two-fold. Firstly if you are going to buy my ebook anyway, this is a request that you do so on a particular day. December 27th to be precise. Having lots of people buy my ebook in a short period of time makes it climb the rankings faster and gives the book more exposure from Amazon. Amazon calculates the rankings hourly and several sales in a single hour even can have a huge affect.

The other half of my reason is simply this – Half of all royalties of this book in its entire lifetime will go to the TRC. Here’s a link for the people that don’t know what charity that is: http://www.trc-uk.org/

It’s my chosen charity for all my book related fundraising. In June I climbed a mountain in the middle of the night to raise money for them and I’m sure I’ll be doing something whacky next year as well, so you’ll also be lining their pockets.

Now I’ve stated why I emailed here’s those blurbs finally:

When Bronwen’s parents die she has to leave her home in the wilderness and try to find the elf city her mother told her about, but with little food and no experience in the wild she risks her life just trying.

Liza doesn’t fit into the Nepharil society, she can’t fly, something her father reminds her of daily. She hasn’t given up trying but her time is running out and her father is impatient to have her married and out of his hands.

To top all that off, if you’re still not convinced I’ve had the ebook priced at the lowest amazon will let me set it to. $0.99/£0.86

So to clarify, please buy my ebook on December 27th and half of all the royalties will go to the TRC and help change the lives of children.

Here’s the two links for the US amazon and the Uk amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Innocent-Hearts-ebook/dp/B006PEPI0W
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Innocent-Hearts-ebook/dp/B006PEPI0W

Also if any of you know any other people who might be interested, please forward the link to this blog on to them or if in the US consider gifting them a copy of the ebook as well.

Thank you.

Merry Christmas everyone. I know most of you will be too busy to see this but for the few people who might log onto the web I hope you have a good Christmas period and to help boost your Christmas I’m going to give away a copy of my latest ebook Innocent Hearts to one commentor (assuming you’re not too busy to comment). I’ll Announce the winner in a few days.

Again Merry Christmas everyone.

I’ve blogged about Entropia once before. It’s one of the MMOG’s (massively multiplayer online game) I play.

Recently they’ve added something to one planet in Entropia called Land deeds. There are 60,000 of them. Each one represents a chunk of the planets surface and gives the player 25% of all gross revenue for that planet on a weekly basis. Not bad really. Each one of these deeds costs 1000Ped or $100 worth of in game money.

I had a look at the companies financial statement and worked out based on the 2010 gross revenue for the planet that the return should be somewhere in the region of $27 per year per deed. A nice healthy 27% ROI per deed. So scraping together some of my in game ped I bought one. I’ve had several weekly payments now and can say I’m very pleased with the amounts I’m getting.

As I predicted it’s around the 27% ROI mark and a nice little earner. I would seriously encourage anyone else interested to check them out. I may even do some kind of low key share based investment into them with other people. If anyone has any other questions then just let me know and I’ll try to answer them. Also here’s a link to the previous entropia blog.

My latest interviewee is L. A. Tripp

Tell us about your latest project.

I’ve got a brand new series I’m super proud of! It’s unlike anything I’ve written before. It’s more of a comedic adventure called All Jacked Up. We follow a young man, Jack, that is just starting out on his own. Single, getting a job, finding his own place, and dealing with the inevitable craziness of his parents, new friends, new co-workers, and the like. Jack strives to make a life for himself, yet tends to fall flat on his face, time and time again. Jack allows us to laugh at ourselves while we laugh at him . . . and mourn for him. This is intended to be a long term series that readers can enjoy for years to come.

What’s your favourite genre to write and what’s your favourite genre to read?

Favorite to read is romantic suspense, ala J.D. Robb. The In Death series is my all time favorite. My favorite to write is anything where I can explore the wonders of sex between a man and a woman. Although, Jack does not have a life full of sex.

Would you still write if there was no financial need to, and if not what would you do instead?

Yes. I never realized this in school, but I’ve written stories for a long time. I wrote my first couple of short stories before high school. I love to write, to create worlds and characters, to create and change the pace of the story. I’d also be doing something else I’m currently doing . . . helping others get their voices out there, too.

Would you ever consider publishing the first things you wrote or would they be too amateur for your own liking?

In their present form, no. Once edited and brought up to my current standard, maybe.

Are there any of your characters you particularly relate to, if there is, who and why?

Yes. The main character (Troy) for my debut series (Woe to the Rich!) was based, in part, on me. The main character in my non-fiction book IS me. And, I definitely took some elements of myself for Jack, too. Which elements I won’t say. You’ll have to read the books to find out, haha.

What are you planning on doing next/What else are you up to?

Next. An extremely busy holiday season. Through a combination of my own books and other authors I’m working with (through my pub company), I have 6 books that are due out in the next 3 months. So, next on my plate is getting all of these projects wrapped as well as keeping the plates spinning on future projects, that are also already planned. As far as what’s next for my own writing, that would be developing Jack and his series, plus a few stand alone stories along the way.

What made you decide to become a publisher?

For one, to help myself. For another, to help other authors. For a 3rd, to ultimately change the way the game is played in publishing. To change the paradigm and rock the world of the Big 6.

You seem to be helping others a lot, is that purely in a publishing capacity?

No, I also help direct them in their marketing efforts and pass along whatever tips I can in this field. Plus I like to build relationships with them and see who they are, as people.

 

For anyone who wishes to find more info on Jack and his adventures you can do so here