My Books

Mothers on The Hero’s Journey

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Hero's Journey Illustration

A Common YA Fantasy Novel Plots: A bunch of kids lead perfectly ordinary lives. One day they learn that the universe is full of magic (or strange science) and if they don’t put down their homework right now (like right now!), everyone they know and love will suffer horribly (or the universe will come to an end, whichever happens first). Hard as they argue, their parents just won’t let them go out after bedtime to save the universe. So after endless texts back and forth, the friends decide to just finish their homework and go to bed. It’s a school night, after all. But in the middle of the night, they wake up and realize that it is up to them to save the world. They sneak out of their house, leave their parents and homework behind, and go out into the night. While wandering at strange times and in unfamiliar places, the friends meet a stranger that tells them he knows the way. The friends, sleep-deprived as they are, believe him and follow him to destinations unknown. The stranger makes the friends do more and more dangerous and crazy stuff. And these young adults do it just because the…

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Book, book promotion, Ethnographic & User Data, My Books, Product Design Strategy

Women, Sex, and Plotlines

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Epic header

I had this idea for writing a post about mothers and their children, but then I’ve decided that I’m too close to that subject at the moment and moved on to writing about sex. Sex sells, right? So here it goes: women, sex, and plotlines. Per statistica.com, 84% of romance readers are women. Obviously, that’s not a big surprise. I remember listening to a woman who was rhapsodizing about ebooks because she no longer needed to make covers to hide the fact she was reading romances on her subway rides to work. Ebooks hide lots of unique reading preferences behind their bland consumer electronics facades. And what people say they read and what they actually buy is quite revealing. The most popular answer to what genre you like to read is mystery/crime/thriller. And yet romance/erotica is by far the most profitable category at $1.44 billion, while crime/mystery came a distant second at $728.2 million. You’d be shocked, shocked to learn that people lie about what they love to read (or do). And while we are focusing a bit on statistics, here’s an interesting tidbit: engineers did research on what kinds of search relating to sex do women do as opposed…

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My Books, Newsletter

Stories, Books, and How and Where We Get Them

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The Shifting Sands Sands of Mars Cover for Kindle Novella

The world has accepted independent filmmakers. These auteurs — def: “auteur is a filmmaker whose personal influence and artistic control over a movie are so great that the filmmaker is regarded as the author of the movie” — are strongly preferred over the “boring” regular movie directors and producers. Auteurs are special. They create true films. They are the “real” storytellers of our modern age. Moviegoers (their audience) either strongly in favor of seeing movies made by independent filmmakers (they certainly allow for more interesting dinner conversations) or they love to hate them. Hate or adoration makes for more intense discussions with friends and family. So if there is such acceptance of indie movie-makers and indie films, why is there a strange sense of negative judgment when it comes to indie writers and indie-published books? I ran into this all the time. Bookstores are uninterested in carrying books by self-published authors, libraries bulk at stocking these books, and the general reaction is that if it is self-made it must be of poor quality. Funny how the label “self-made” can be both a negative AND a positive: “He is a self-made man.” or “He wears self-made clothing.” or “He makes his…

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Background Knowledge, Background Knowledge Errors, Newsletter

The Wrong Person, at the Wrong Time, Doing the Wrong Thing

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Calvin Klein Ad in Times Square

It happens to everyone from time to time — you are just not the ONE. Let me tell you a little story from way back in my high school. I skipped the eighth grade and most of the seventh during my family’s relocation from USSR to New York City. I went directly into high school — the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan. It was really an amazing school — tons of art instruction and a good academic program. The problem is that I’m horrible at languages and really couldn’t put two English words together, much less spell my name. This was the start of very confusing times. I’ve managed to talk my way into 10th-grade art curriculum. No idea how other than I didn’t like my classes, but I didn’t figure out that I was a grade ahead for almost a year. I struggled to answer questions in science and math — I knew the material but had no words to demonstrate what I knew. I had no words to speak my mind. I had to learn a whole new notation for showing geometric proofs. I was finally put into an ESL class — English as a…

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Book, My Books, Newsletter

New Book: Mirror Shards

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Mirror Shards Cover

I found the pandemic not very conducing to marketing or facing the world in more public ways. I did write a lot and have several books in various stages of readiness. But there was one story I wanted to enter into a competition (the books I’ve entered last year, God of Small Affairs, placed as a semi-finalist). So after sitting on Mirror Shards for almost a year, I’m finally releasing this book into the world. Here’s a description and if you click on the title above, you will get to the first few chapters hoasted on my site. Trapped Between Infinite Possible Realities Hig is a disabled kid with a loving mom, a baby sister, a distant father, and a doting uncle, Charlie. On a trip to a county fair, the family encounters a mysterious “Mirror of Wishes” booth that leads to radical, unexplained life changes, including Hig’s uncle’s abrupt disappearance and his mother’s untimely death. One of the changes is Hig’s miraculous cure—his congenital spina bifida is gone and he no longer needs a wheelchair. As Hig grows up, he continuously frets about what really happened but is too scared to actually look for answers to the mystery. Years…

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Attention, book promotion, Newsletter, Personality

Of Marshmallows and Masks

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Marshmallow Test

Most everyone in my family, most of our friends, and a lot of our neighbors have received at least one COVID vaccination shot! It is starting to feel like this year-long nightmare is winding down. And we are lucky to live in the right country and in the right state and in the right city where things are likely to get back to normal sooner rather than later. No one can deny that this had been a very difficult year. But part of the difficulty had been our own behavior. It is quite possible that if we heeded the science and recommendations from the doctors (not the politicians), we would have been here sooner with fewer lives lost and less devastation to our economy. So why didn’t we do all we could to arrest the progress of this devastating disease? Why did we take stupid risks? Why did some people refuse to wear masks and self-isolate? Well, consider the Marshmallow Test. In brief, a Marshmallow Test is an experiment that tries to measure the delayed gratification quotient. A child is given a marshmallow (or any other small but highly desired reward) and asked to wait alone in the room with…

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Newsletter

Spring Back, an American Gothic

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Spring in Goscieradz by Leon Wyczółkowski 1933

It’s spring. It’s the anniversary of our collective isolation. And for the first time, it feels like things might be looking better, like we might be able to put this whole year behind us…spring back to normal. We are reaching towards a resolution point of this gothic horror narrative. Gothic Fiction To survive, I’ve read and written a lot this year (I haven’t published much, but that takes a different sort of energy of which I apparently don’t have any). The subject matter of my readings has varied widely — science fiction, science, horror, collected stories, Japanese literature, old fiction and contemporary writings (I will make a few recommendations below). My writing has been quite different too. I wrote a bunch of short stories that were more horror than sci-fi. I wrote a middle-grade novel about demon godparents (and Christopher, my life and writing partner, is in the process of rewriting it — our stories are better when we write together). I’ve written a novel about alternate histories (many different possible timelines that allow the main character to escape one fate in preference for another). I’m about two-thirds into writing the origin story of Baba Yaga — a one-legged daughter…

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