New Gold City

Several weeks ago I used three of my Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) free days and watched 10,110 people download my novel, Beyond the Will of God . The book is currently priced at $2.99 (that will change in the fall and go up to $4.99). By most accounts that's a fairly successful KDP promo. Unfortunately, Amazon has changed their algorithms around in the past few months. Whereas once my successful free days would give a novel lift in the Amazon ranking system that would extend past the promo, now their calculations give my book very meager support. Within a few days Beyond the Will of God had dropped from being in the top 20 popularity list for mysteries out of the Top 100.  I'm not complaining. There are many benefits to getting exposure to 10,000 ereaders in a three-day period. The main one, obviously, is that my book is out there. When people like it, they'll let others know. Amazon's networking approach to sales is also impacted. My book will show up on lists lik...

The author with his first son in 1988. This blog, The Formality of Occurrence , began as a series of episodes that became the story of how I found my birthmother. I was adopted in 1958. My birth parents were both teenagers living in a small city in Indiana. My particular story was driven as well by the desire to understand my biological roots for my three sons beginning in 1988. I'd grown up with dark features and skin the color of creamed coffee. It was important to me to understand the story of my origin because the older I got the more I felt somehow cut off from all of society with no idea where I came from and what my beginning was in the story of my life. I didn't want my sons to even remotely feel that way. I found my birthmother (the story will be out as a book sometime within the next two years) and I now know that I am mixed race. My birthmother and I are very close. I am close as well to her husband and my three half-brothers. I'm proud to claim two quite separat...

A review I did for TalkingWriting.com back in January of 2011 has been reposted as part of their summer "Writing and Music" feature. "Deep By Sound Alone," (a magically crafted headline by Martha Nichols, founder and editor in chief at Talking Writing) is a review of The Anthology of Rap . I recall being quite happy with the final state of this review. Typically, writing book reviews freaks me out. The more I publish the harder it gets to be critical of someone else's work. I know firsthand what it takes to bring a book to press. I also know that the blood, sweat, and tears a writer and her team put into producing a book is not about looking to be criticized.  But this review is about more than whether I liked The Anthology of Rap as an anthology. It's about me learning to appreciate a form of music that I haven't given a chance over the years. I've even said that rap isn't music. In fact, I sort of say that in my review:  I don’t agree with t...

As an independent author, I am always tuned in to plagiarism and copyright issues. I've written on these topics already this year, but they are so vast and dynamic I want to first reiterate something important for all readers, writers, agents, publishers, and editors to think about. This industry is in the process of re-making itself from the ground up. There are no real rules anymore. There's a revolution going on in the publishing world. And when things are hot during revolutions everyone's confused as hell -- especially those who think they know what's going on. The core principle of publishing has always been copyright law. The associated tacit principle "thou shalt not steal from another writer" has always been the first law of professional ethics. But these two issues are now getting a major overhaul whether we like it or not. And what's really fascinating is that since no one really knows where we're going and there are no longer rules in the in...

A teacher in the making. When I was in college trying to figure out what I would do with my life, I knew that my "fall back" job could be as a teacher. It really didn't matter what level of teaching -- to me being a professor at a prestigious university was the same as teaching social studies to 7th graders or running a 1st grade class at a suburban or urban school. Teaching was an honorable profession with decent pay and usually quality benefits. But to me it was also removed from reality. I grew up in an academic household. To me, teachers talked about the world and educated about it, but they didn't actively participate. In the end, I became an environmental planner and activist. I put my social science education and math abilities to use as a consultant specializing in energy conservation, technology efficiency, and recycling. I had a marvelous and exciting 30-year career working with the public and private sector trying to make our energy and solid waste infrastr...

It's all so simple! Years ago I learned how weird the creative mind is. Subconscious thought needs to be given a great deal of leeway in the artistic process. One of the first real short stories I wrote ( real meaning that it wasn't written as an assignment for a creative writing of English class) was called "The Rapist." I'd been reading a lot of Russian literature, particularly Dostoevsky, Chekhov and Gogol along with European existentialism and theater of the absurd. I was 21 at the time and had taken a semester off from college because my major -- anthropology -- meant I wasn't getting enough opportunity to read what I wanted (which was fiction -- existential fiction in particular). I also wanted to see what would happen if I just got up every morning and wrote with no purpose and no planning. At first I wrote pathetically pedantic plays with characters espousing idiotic philosophical notions about mortality, God, and religion.  What I really wanted to do...

For the past three decades I've been looking for novels and stories that illuminate the power of music. Rhythm linked with melody seems to go all the way to the depths of the human soul. This astonishes me. I have loved music all of my life. My father played every form of classical music in our house when I was growing up. And he played his music loud. By the time I was four it was profoundly comforting listening to everything from opera to string quartets or solo piano at volumes well in excess of five on a hi-fi system. During the heyday of the audiophile in the late '60s and early '70s, my dad built himself a monstrous stereo system using state-of-the-art electronics and Scandinavian components. I got to hear Mahler and Tchaikovsky so loud and so pure they went all the way into me and moved me forever.  Pop music touched me early on as well. I fell in love with The Beatles by the time I was six (summer of 1964) and its been clear sailing since. In 1971 my older cousin in...