I tracked down my son’s mom and made contact. It’s been about 6 years I guess now. Or, maybe it just seems like 6 years. Not having your first born around for many years is a really difficult way to go through life, and yet I had resigned myself to it. It hurt every day. I’m a big believer in keeping the interactions between dad and mom low-key in front of the kids. Yes, even when it means mom is taking off with the kid(s). It just doesn’t make any sense to argue and get emotional in front of my son – and I won’t ever let that happen. There were numerous times i wanted to throw something at his mom – like a sword or heavy table, but I held on and let it play out without upsetting my son.

I went through a fatherless life, and as I look back on it I gotta say the experience was NOT all that bad. My mom did her best, and it wasn’t enough – and STILL – I turned out fine. I think there’s quite a bit of leeway in there for kids to go without one of the parents if the one parent really loves them and takes care of them well. Had my son’s mom not wanted to take my son – for whatever reason, I would have jumped up and down at the opportunity. Anyway, it didn’t work out like that.

There might be a break in the horizon. I’m going to head back for a visit next year – 2011 – maybe May or so. In the meantime there’s a lot of stuff to do. I’m actually considering moving back to the US of A. I never thought I’d say that. Being in Thailand for 6 years has been nice. It’s been amazing really. I now have a new baby girl and wife and I finally know what a family is supposed to be like. This is it. Will returning to the US put us to the test? I’m sure it will. I can’t see not trying to make yet another run of living close to my son if it’s at all possible. His mom is flitty and may decide to take off and leave the area when we do move over that way. That would make it the 3rd time. She insists it’s not like that this time…

The difference between stress levels in the USA versus living in Thailand isn’t like night and day… it’s like red and ocean. It’s that different. Imagine not having to think about health insurance, speeding, the cost of gas, the cost of car insurance, gangs, assault, or even the time of day it is. That’s Thailand. I haven’t worn a watch for 3 years. I don’t see many Thais wear them either – there’s little point in one.

I’d need to find a job in the US. Internet marketing manager is the likely role I’d play. There are 100 things I could do, and that one would make the most cash. When living in the USA – it’s all about cash. That in itself is distressing.

Or, I could write a masterpiece. I’ve been thinking about this masterful idea for a book… it’s always in my head. I just can’t wrap my head around it. The idea is huge. I’ve considered creating a spreadsheet wiki for it and enabling everyone in the world to fill in instances of situations they’ve noticed that add data to the project. I mean, it’s massive. I need to figure out a way to cut it down to something manageable. Something you could converse with others about. Right now the idea is not in that format.

Hmm, what were the other ideas for making a lot of cash quick?

• Sell all websites.
• Create a website that is huge and that makes cash, and sell it.
• Go to Burma (Myanmar) and work for a couple of years.
• Go to Brunei, Iraq, Afghanistan, or other war-torn area and make bank for a year – and dodge bullets and knives.

Living in the states is expensive. It’s sickening how expensive it is. It’s disgusting how much taxes are. It’s nuts how difficult it is to save some cash for a rainy day, or rainy retirement.

I hope he hits some sand on the road...

Look at this jackass. I’m glad I found this photo. You know, adult men and women that want others to look at them annoy me to no fucking end.

I’m reminded of my good friend, a degenerate all during high school that topped it in spades during his adult life. He was always doing things so people would look at him. My mom said he needed “attention”. During my psychology grad program I heard it termed, attention seeking behavior. Youngest kids in the family unit seem to have this affliction more than kids from the other birth orders. Kids that act the ass in school get to be annoying for the teachers first, and later – even friends tire of it.

When I hit adulthood I noticed – wow, these idiots are everywhere. It doesn’t end in childhood, it’s just exacerbated in adulthood. While in the Air Force immediately after high school I noticed there were more jackasses in one place than I ever saw in my life. Not the air force, mostly the marines! There were more attention seeking dysfunctional idiots in one place than I thought possible.

Then I noticed, after the military – wow, they’re everywhere in society too. Concentrated in the military, but generally dispursed all over the USA. Guys and girls that got tattoos on their arms so they’d look interesting and others would look at them. People that dress differently so they could cause a stir. People that didn’t follow traditional dress code like everyone else, but that were seeking individuality which wasn’t individual AT ALL – but just copied others in their dysfunctional little societal subgroup.

Harley Davidson motorcycles and really loud trucks and cars have to be the ultimate royal ass pain. Fat guys with beards and mustaches and their girlfriends and wives hide behind black leather, sunglasses, greasy hair, cigarettes and tattoos, only to demand attention when driving by on their jetplane loud motorcycles. Who the fuck wants to look at that?

Don’t you want to knock them off the seat with a bat?

It’s so bizarre that human beings are like this. Is it our fault? Really, if you look at the heart of it – it’s not. We were born with this predisposition to NEED attention. If we don’t get it we pierce our tongues, eyebrows, nose, lips, nips, and taints so others will look at us. People are GOING to GET attention whether others want to give it to them in a good way or not. Negative attention is attention all the same, just a different color.

It’s a f a r k e d life my friends !

Writing a book is the most time intensive creative thing you can do. I think.

Book writing, when compared to other things creative – is definitely high on the list. I guess creating a building would be time intensive, but that’s a team of people. If you did it yourself I guess it could be a couple month project. Is putting rectangles and other shapes together – taking their physical properties into account – creative? I guess it is…

I guess a symphony composition would be tough – but who is doing that anymore?

Writing a book in the old style – for print, takes a long, long time. Hundreds of hours. Maybe thousands. If you work 8 hours a day for 5 days a week that works out to 21-2,000 hours in a year I think I remember from somewhere (too tired to do my figurin’). That’s a full year of work. Since some people take years to finish their books, you can see where I’m going with this.

How long does it take to write a song? I think I could write a great song in anywhere from 1-3 days. The music – someone else would have to handle. I’m no musician. A song has the potential to affect the entire world – to rev them up and get them dancing in the street. A song can affect our emotions intensely. Much more than a book I think. For most people anyway.

How long does it take to create a sculpture? Lets say a full human figure of marble… a couple weeks? A couple of months? Not longer than a couple of months I’m sure. I have no skills in that area either – but, someone that did could whip up a marble statue in a couple of months – surely.

What else is there?

Origami? Maybe it would take you a week to come up with something different.

Website post? Couple hours, day or two at the most for a good article of 500-1000 words.

Drawing a scene? I’ve seen people draw an entire detailed scene in minutes. Painting a portrait… couple weeks? Max.

Photographer? I can’t call a photographer creative – as hard as I try. I was a photographer. Sure there is some skill to it, but basically you’re pushing a button at the right time when the settings are correct. It does take some imagination to take great photos. I’ve seen some advertising photos that took a lot of thought. How much? Couple days. Week at most.

Directing a movie? Writing the movie took the effort and time. Is putting the movie on film really that creative? Nah. I don’t think so. You already have a script – like a book someone wrote… nahhh.

I must be missing about 90 things – but I can’t come up with anything else really creative – like an artist would do.

Pottery? A couple of minutes. Glass blowing? A day, couple days.

Book writing or script writing for a movie takes more thought than maybe anything else you can do creatively.

Can anyone think of anything that takes more time?

1. Audiobooks are faster than reading your own book in most cases. If you read slowly, audiobooks might be what you need.
2. Audiobooks can be consumed almost anywhere you are… work, car, running, or church (if you sit in the back!).

Here are the Steps I used to Create My Audiobook: Kicking Smoking’s Ass!

Step 1: Create a written book first. Some will argue this, but I can’t see audiobooks being done any other way. Some have told me that they create an outline and then just start talking, re-recording the audio over and over as they make mistakes, which inevitably you do when you’re just talking off the cuff.

I created an outline of my book first. Then I started adding info to each chapter. Eventually I fleshed out the entire book. Audiobooks, ebooks, books nowadays need not be 80,000 words long. In fact, they probably shouldn’t be. Those that read books are enjoying the shorter length style that ebooks are making popular. Shoot for 15,000 to 30,000 words on average. Kicking Smoking’s Ass! is 25,000 words and 96 pages in length in PDF format.

Step 2: Figure out how you’ll record your book. I began using my Nokia 5800 xPress phone that has a voice recorder option that allows me to go for an hour of audio (speech) at a time. It sounded good, but not awesome. If it’s all you have – you can definitely use that option. A good mobile phone can record audio good enough for an audiobook. I’ve used the voice recorder on that Nokia and on my Nokia e71 for other audio projects and they worked fine.

If, however, you want to up the quality a notch you can buy a headset with earphones and microphone to put on your head and record. My headset has two plugs that went into my computer – 1 for sound – 1 for microphone.

The computer program I used for recording the audiobook is “Audacity”. It’s a freeware program that is not all that intuitive to figure out, but there are a few basic tutorials in the help section you can use to get started.

Step 3: As you record each chapter of your book strive to put some emotion into the audio because otherwise you’re going to bore the hell out of your listener. Why do you not want to bore your book listener? You won’t sell another book to that person, that’s why.

Emphasize some parts of your content as read with pauses. Change the tone of your voice. Break it up a little bit with some notes that are not in your actual book – but that add helpful information. I did this a few times in my book and I think it added considerably, and snapped people out of the trance they were probably in after nearly 2 hours of listening to the book in their ears.

If you reference website URLs or parts of your ebook or hard book that they should look at with their eyes – have that stuff also on a website with an easy url you can tell them to go have a look at.

Step 4: While you record you’re going to make errors – just keep going. Don’t stop and reset yourself and then hit record again. First of all you’re going to waste hours of extra time this way. Secondly, the audio recording quality will suffer because it will sound as if you did just that – stopped, rewound yourself, and started again. When you speak for the audiobooks your voice needs that nice flow to it – like you’re telling a story. Strangeness in the flow is going to make for a very poor listening experience. So, record each chapter in full and if you screw up – leave some time after that screw up – 3-4 seconds so you see it easily on Audacity as you’re editing it out. I also say something like “redo that” so I know to watch for which part of the audiotrack I need to edit out.

Step 5: In Audacity you’ll click on the 2nd track and turn it blue. Then use CTRL+a to copy all of it. Go up to the right of the Track 1 and right click in the space and “paste”. You’ll do this with each track, 3rd, 4th, etc… all the way until you’re done. Close all the other tracks (2nd and all the rest). Save that first track as a project using the File menu.

Step 6: Edit your file, removing all the errors you made, and shortening up the gap of silence that sometimes appears between speaking parts. Remove all strange noises that don’t happen at the same time as you speaking. In my case, the headset was clicking every time I moved my head. I had to remove about 600 clicks of that. They left an easy to see wave in the editor, but still. Make sure you have no clicks when you’re recording, no door slams, no car horns, no kids crying. I also had to erase quite a few mouth noises – as I opened my mouth to say something I guess my lips made a noise because I was breathing in hard at the same time.

Anyway – it’s quite an adventure your first time. You’ll learn a lot about how you sound to other people.

Once you’ve edited out the strange sounds to your satisfaction you export the file to .mp3 format. You’ll need to go find a driver file – a .DLL file but Audacity tells you where to find it. Save it someplace you’ll remember because you have to point the program to the  driver later. You do that one time – it enables you to save files as MP3. Which is probably the file you want to use.

Step 7: Upload that large file, mine was 110MB large, to a server at your website or you might want to burn them to CD’s and sell them that way.

Step 8: You can setup your audiobook at www.e-junkie.com so other people can sell it as affiliates. This means they sell your audiobooks for commission. It’s an easier system than Clickbank.com – but, ideally you’ll be setup at both of these services.

This is the bare minimum scenario you need to take one of your print or ebooks into the realm of audiobooks.

Today she went to a special needs school to help volunteers teach at the school. She coordinates placements of volunteers to help poor or disadvantaged kids.

She showed me photos in her camera of a 7 yr old boy with multiple disabilities. He has autism and can’t speak. He grunts and makes noises. Apparently he understands some things he hears but it’s best to use hand motions to teach him or tell him what you want. His whole right side is weak as if suffering from a stroke.

The saddest thing…?

When he was born his parents realized something was wrong with him. They never treated him as a human being worth their time or effort to help – they treated him like there was something profoundly wrong with him and like an animal.

They soon divorced. When they did – neither his mom or his dad wanted the boy and they dropped him off at the dad’s mother’s house – who is very old and has no money coming in.

I’m not at the saddest part yet.

The most heartbreaking thing I think I ever heard was that the boy won’t let others touch him because he knows he’s not worth it. He knows he’s not human – he believes it with his entire self – that’s what he learned from his parents. He believes he is not human and not worth someone’s effort to praise, touch, or hold him. He won’t allow himself to feel any love because his self esteem is rock bottom.

Did you ever hear of such a thing?

Welcome to God’s Game 101. I’ll help you come to an understanding I have about whatever god or series of events made this absolute tragedy that we call life.

God must really have a good plan for this little boy, eh?

As near as I can figure they are now charging authors, publishers for the distribution digitally of their books. My books are all well compressed using MS Word’s image compression function so most of my books are in the 1-3MB range. This costs only about 40 cents to send to buyers that want to view the ebooks on their Kindle ebook readers.

When you opt-in into the program you have to go through the waiting process AGAIN to have your book clear. Even if you make no other edits to your books.

Maybe I’m missing something, but, when it asks if you want to make 35% commission or 70% – and it shows you a calculator below the price you chose for your book – and you can see exactly the difference… is that a no-brainer?

There is a chance I’m missing something here… please, someone enlighten me if you “get it” and I don’t.

Cheers…

Kicking Smoking’s Ass! is a motivational stop smoking book that I think has a lot of potential. What remains to be seen is how it affects smokers and whether it motivates them to quit or not. It’s quite tough in book format. I hope the audio file works better – or in combination with each other, to help smokers quit.

I got really excited about my next book – Kicking Life’s Ass! I started on an outline for it last night. This might well be the best book I’ve done. The idea is very nice… just have to flesh it out. I have the domain name already so don’t even try it!

Pros

Joining is free. They take care of all payment processing. You need not reside in the USA and can have checks sent to wherever you are in the world. Their market is massive. Even if your book is completely unknown – like most of mine are, you will sell some books. There’s SOMEONE out there looking for a book like yours.
Cons of using Amazon to sell your digital books

The first major con is that you don’t even get to set your own price for your book. They give you the illusion of setting your own price, but then they change it at will. I chose $9.99 for some of my books. They jacked it up to $11.99. What this means is that my books are not as attractive as all the $9.99 books. WTF? The percentage I make is 35%. Not of the actual price of the book though! I make 35% of the price I chose for the book! I make $3.50 per book that sells for $11.99.

WHAT THE F?

Oh wait, I almost forgot the best part… they make you promise in the terms and conditions that you cannot sell your book for LESS THAN WHAT THEY ARE SELLING IT FOR! Ha! So- if you tell them to sell your book at $9.99. They ignore you and sell it at $11.99. YOU CANNOT SELL YOUR BOOK FOR LESS THAN THAT ON YOUR OWN SITE!

The second major con is that Amazon keeps all the buyer data. You sell a book for $3.50 and don’t get any of the data about the buyer. You don’t know what site they came from. You don’t know what else they bought. You don’t know their age, sex, location in the world, nothing. You don’t know their email address. In short you DON’T KNOW JACK about the buyer of your book. You don’t even know – was it bought at Amazon or an Amazon partner site? WTF?

At the beginning of your professional writing career you may choose to list your books at Amazon – like I have. The owner of my books makes a pittance from it – but, it takes just about that much to live in Thailand.

Kicking Fat’s Ass is a new book I just released in June 2010. I’ve had a problem with weight gain – exactly one time. I had slowly gained over 30 pounds over some months – and my wife took a photo of the back of me as I sat in a meditation pose while on a waterfall trip.

When I saw that photo – I almost screamed – WHO IS THAT? I had big love handles and my back was all flabby. I was horrified. I’d never had a problem with weight in my entire life – and I wasn’t going to start either.

I drew on my knowledge I’d learned helping others I’d counseled lose weight and blow past mental health issues over the years. I changed about 20 things I was doing, eating, and thinking… and bang! I crushed it. I lost more than 30 pounds and actually had to eat more to get back up to a normal weight.

This book is 56 pages of kick-in-the-head about why you gained weight, and how you’ll crush it this time – as easily as it came.

The formula is simple. It’s quite simple.

Find out:

• 6 Secrets to Kicking Fat’s Ass
• THE Game changer that happens naturally after just a few days of applying this system. From there on – the game is won.

I had prices for ebooks up at $19.99 and, though they sold – it wasn’t often enough. I have dropped the prices to most ebooks to $9.99 for a test – today you can have it for $9.99!

Anytime after you add a book to your cart you can checkout or see what is in the cart with “VIEW CART”:

If you don’t need a shopping cart because you’re buying only 1 book – choose the buy now button below:

The 2nd book in the Kicking ___’s Ass! series is finished – just getting some feedback from a couple of people before I make it live.

Stopping smoking is becoming a financial necessity for so many people. $10 a pack in NYC now. $15 a pack… is coming within a few years I’m sure. If you haven’t given up smoking – there’s never been a better time. Because – this book wasn’t even in existence before!

Kicking Smoking’s Ass! uses the best techniques available to help you quit cold turkey without any nicotine replacement aids. That might sound scary to some of you – but, there is a hidden jewel in this book that takes the scariness right out of cold turkey quitting. The technique is nothing short of BRILLIANT and it’s all anyone is going to be talking about once this book goes live and the competition figures out what hit them.

Stopping smoking, if done very intelligently is a no-brainer.

Not joking.

CRUSH your smoking habit as soon as you choose to.

Get the book.