I’ve been doing pretty well about not writing here, it is one of my New Year’s Resolutions, but when I have something to say – I gotta say it. BALL LIGHTNING came into my hotel room in Thailand yesterday as I was relaxing on the bed working on the computer! It was one of the most amazing experiences I have ever had. However, I have had a number of weird happenings with lightning in the past. I’ll list them after the Ball Lightning video below.

I don’t have photos or video of this event. That sucks. Yet, there was no time at all. It all happened in 4-5 seconds. I was stunned the first 3-4 seconds, and my mind literally just didn’t work. I wasn’t afraid or cognizant of what the hell was happening. Then when I realized it was some sort of lightning, I was petrified with fear and my skin goosebumped on my arms and legs, and chills shot up and down my back.

I posted a video of exactly what happened below. I shot it in the hotel room shortly after the incident, and yet enough time had passed that I was able to shoot the video – which required walking over to the window where it happened.

Here’s the description of the Ball Lightning entering my room in Surat Thani, Thailand yesterday as I first wrote it down in the computer:

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4/15/13 17:25

During daylight hours, ball lightning came into my hotel room on the 5th floor of Liamsai Hotel in Surat Thani, Thailand – located in Southern Thailand, north of Phuket Island. I first saw the ball just und the air conditioner, which was running and set at 25C. It was not electricity from the air conditioner. It was not from any wires – none are exposed. It was just all the suddenly in the room. It had a ball shape, about as big as a volleyball.

It came through the window, I guess. It just materialised in the room by the window. It was very bright – like camera-flash bright and yet I was still able to stare right at it. I saw no details in the light, it was just solid bright, and not seeming to light up the room at all, it was sort of contained within itself. There was a loud humming noise which might have been the air conditioner struggling to continue working as this ball passed within inches underneath it. The ball moved into the room horizontally about 4 feet inward from the window, horizontally, about 5 feet off the floor. It remained motionless for about a second. This was the closest I got to the object, and this was about 1 meter away from my face. I was absolutely transfixed by it. I couldn’t move. Then it disappeared.

I slammed my computer screen shut and yanked out the cord from the A/C outlet. I shut off the air conditioner with the remote.

It was raining medium hard for 20-30 mins before this happened. I didn’t hear thunder before or after the incident. There was no odor. The ball of light did not pulse or change in intensity, it was steadily very bright. I felt no heat or cold during the incident. I saw no traces of it on the window, curtains, ceiling, walls, or pillar. There was no smell at all.

I still feel a tingling inside me, though maybe it’s just my nerves still firing.

One of the oddest things ever…

I just researched it online and found out that sometimes it explodes and kills people close by. Other times, it goes away silently.

I’m still tingling all over… It has been about an hour since the experience happened. I am rather afraid to go to the window to film a video about how it all went down, yet I know I must. I’m half hoping to see it again and get it on video. I am trying to replicate the situation, with all the variables the same as much as possible. There seems to be another storm coming in.

Update – the storm never made it to where I was, it veered off in another direction.

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Ball Lightning Resources:

A reports database. I filed one here, it hasn’t been moderated yet. There are hundreds of reports. I didn’t see any that seemed like a person wrote it just for the attention, or for nefarious reasons: Ball Lightning Reports Database

This guy looks at 130 ball lightning first-hand reports and tries to deduce some information about them.

Wikipedia entry on Ball Lightning

Ball Lightning in Thailand video below:

Other weird lightning experiences I’ve had:

1. My airplane flying over North Carolina in a wicked summer thunderstorm, was hit by lightning on the right wing. I was seated right behind that wing. Every passenger was dead silent, as was the plane as all systems shut down – all engines. Just before we all started panicking and screaming, the lights flickered, came back on… we heard the engines start again. The pilot said absolutely nothing. It mattered little, everyone on the plane knew exactly what happened. The sound was like someone had just dropped a cement truck on the wing from 1,000 feet.

2. After climbing a mountain in Thailand one time, a series of about 50 lightning bolts hit the top of the mountain as I ran around looking for a safe place to hide from it. One bolt hit about 12 feet away, and two more came within 25 feet. It was quite scary.

3. Also on that same mountain… I was at the top walking around, there was a storm about 4 miles away, we could see it plainly. Suddenly I felt every hair on my body stand up – and me and the other person at the top was enveloped in an electrical force field of some sort – I fully expected to be hit by a lightning bolt. Instead, I watched as a very strong bolt formed in the clouds making up the storm 5 miles away. The bolt was so strong, it energized everything even that many miles from where it hit. I was taking a photo of the storm at the same instant I felt this weird electric charge. See the photo and story here – Lightning Story.

Here’s my chat with Sony about pulling my frickin books off their virtual shelves like they should have done 3 weeks ago when I yanked them from Smashwords:

Finally finished the second book in the Thailand’s Sickest series. I sent it off to friends for feedback and if you joined the list on the right hand column there, you will receive a message on Monday morning with directions for getting my next fiction book, Thailand’s Sickest – Hell To Pay.

Thanks for your patience, it has taken quite a bit longer than I imagined it would. This book is edited and in much better shape than the first book in the series when I released it about four years ago. Just to bring you up to speed, that first book has now been edited extensively and will be a much smoother read than the first time you read it. Guaranteed!

Best of luck and life,

MF

If you believe the fear-mongers, the world is overdue for a catastrophic event – not just earthquakes and natural disasters, but for something of man’s own doing. For the last dozen years it seems, the world’s people have not been thriving economically. Well, unless you had an internet business. This year, the prognosis looks pretty bleak. Any number of events could cause a landslide across the world’s financial markets.

What would happen then? Would a country like China use it as an opportunity to go on a land acquisition crusade? Would the USA? Would the Soviets?

Anything could happen.

So, what to do?

I just ignore it all. Really, out of pure unadulturated ignorance, I just choose to ignore the whole mess. I figure it like this. If the world economy crashes, the only thing I’ll have to worry about for our family, is food. Do you know how many coconut trees there are in Thailand? Heaps. I’d make like a monkey and start harvesting coconuts like a fiend. Did you know that the juice of a coconut has the same consistency as our blood? You can actually give yourself an IV of coconut water, and survive on it for a while. It’s very near sterile too. Just FYI, you know, if the whole world goes to hell this year.

Wait a second, rewind that. I’d have a couple smart monkeys that ran out and brought coconuts back to the house for us. I wonder how much two of those would cost?

Of course we’d start planting all sorts of stuff to eat too, seems like everything grows in Thailand – we have so many varieties of fruit and vegetables farmers go out of business just because they can’t decide on WHAT to plant. Everything grows. I guess we’d all eat giant waterbugs, bamboo worms, crickets, grasshoppers, ant eggs, snakes, eels, and whatever else we could find. You know, Thailand and Laos might come out of this whole meltdown better than the USA. They’ve been eating bugs since before it was ever fashionable.

To protect us, I’d buy a couple of handguns and a lifetime supply of ammunition. I’d also surround our home with a fence, and keep Monocled Cobras, Indo-Chinese Spitting Cobras, King Cobras, Banded and Malayan Kraits, Malayan Pit Vipers and some Wagler’s vipers. Thais are scared lifeless of snakes. It would take a long time for them just to get past the yard. Inside our home I’d have whatever big dogs I could find – Rotty’s I guess.

If all that wasn’t enough, well then we’d perish like most people. We couldn’t hold back an army. I think that’s the reality of it… you hold out for as long as you can, but eventually you’ll be up against a force bigger than you that will dictate what happens. You can either live with it, or die trying to fight against it.

With all this in mind, my brother started a company that is based on staying prepared. It’s Pharaoh’s Dream. He has a pretty good idea, and he’s selling packages to churches mostly. He and his wife bought more than $5,000 worth the preparations to see how it all works, see how the food tastes, and so on. Seems like he’s poised to capture a significant piece of the pie.

You think the world is going to Hell this year?

Everyday I’m lucky enough to wake up, I tell myself I have terminal cancer. That way I don’t waste any time screwing around, I just go straight to work writing whatever book(s) I’m working on. When I’m done and my daughter wakes up from her afternoon nap, we go spend a couple hours at the  playground, snake hunting, or riding her bike.

Talk about lighting a fire under my ass… I’m only concerned with activities that are either fun, or work. There’s no real in-between. I don’t watch TV, I don’t listen to music much, I don’t sit around reading books. I just work on my own writing, and then go have fun the rest of the day.

There is probably no better motivator to get yourself straight – than self-diagnosing a terminal illness.

I highly recommend it.

If you have a big book inside you, it need not take a year or even five, to write. Anthony Burgess wrote A Clockwork Orange in 3 weeks!

While  I don’t have any illusions of being able to duplicate that feat, it does give me something to think about. When I think about writing an amazing book, a book that changes the world, I always figure on a year minimum to write it. There is never any guarantee of success, in fact, you have less than a 1/100,000 chance of writing a great book, no matter how much energy, time, sweat, and tears you put into it.

When I look at it like a year project, that might go entirely to the birds, I just cannot get very excited about the idea. However, if I look at it as 3 weeks, a month, 2 months… then it becomes almost worth it to try. It might be a wasted effort, but at least it wasn’t an entire year wasted! At this age I don’t have too many years to waste. Neither do you.

Write something big next time. Challenge yourself. Make your head spin.

This is a GOOD THING. It’s good because a number of us – thousands, I imagine, have been seeing sales just disappear from our tally sheets in Amazon KDP over the last couple days, and I think some people, weeks.

Here’s the message I just got upon trying to see my reports…

“Reports are currently undergoing scheduled maintenance and should be available again very soon.”

It’s funny, it says “scheduled maintenance” – yeah, they scheduled maintenance when they realized the whole thing was FOOKED.

Our UK store had over 100 sales disappear yesterday. Not a good feeling. I checked the KDP message board and found that many other people had lost sales from day to day. Some sales went down to zero for the month so far! Outrageous – right?

Hopefully Amazon straightens this out and gets back to whatever “normal” was.

While they’re at it – they could do something about simple price changes needing 7 days now, which sometimes turns into 12 days, with my experience. It used to be 24 hours to do something simple.

I can’t tell you what it felt like to read this woman’s review of Thailand’s Sickest. A writer that actually finishes a fiction book and publishes it – has an idea that what he/she wrote is of some entertainment value. I really thought Thailand’s Sickest was one of those books that a lot of people could relate to. I thought many people would be hit hard by this book. I had no idea whether that was true. Lately I’m finding out – this book hits some people really hard.

Here is her review – thanks so much Faith-Anne, for giving me permission to post it here!

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Dear Mr. Fook,

My name is Faith-Anne Wagner and I am a 48 year old woman living on the shore of New Jersey. I am an avid mystery/thriller reader and just read Thailand’s Sickest in a little less than 24 hours. It is 6:02 a.m. and as I listen to my daughter getting ready for school, I felt compelled to write you and tell you how I felt about what I have just read. At first I wasn’t sure if it was my cup of tea. It scared me to tell you the truth. But, I couldn’t put it down. My husband gets up at 4:00 for work (he works for the NJ Transit Rail) and when the alarm went off, he was shocked to see me still awake reading. He thought I was nuts!!

I have worked in law for 25 years and after the most difficult year of my life (2012), I am taking a break to heal both physically and emotionally from it. Still, staying up for 24 straight hours to read a book is definitely not in my realm of normalcy. I haven’t done it since before our children (2 of which are now grown and married and 1 still here who is graduating High School a year early at 16) were born. Only one other author (my favorite, Stephen King) has ever made me do it.

I think that’s why I had to write you. I feel that the 2 decades of reading his work sort of “prepared” me to read your book. It was horrible and brilliant, simultaneously. It made me cry and also made me chuckle at your sense of humor during the most difficult chapters.

Please keep writing. You are amazingly gifted and I am putting you up there with SK in my list. Now, I have to try and get a few hours of rest. Lol. Our daughter just found me awake, writing you and asked me if Aliens came and took her mom and replaced her with me. Ha. It’s nice to know I can still shock them. Have a happy, healthy and prosperous New Year.

Sincerely,

Faith-Anne

* * *

Wow, I just read it for about the fifth time. That was an awesome review.

As I was saying, a writer doesn’t know how good the product was until the reviews or rips start coming in. My first clue that this was a great book was when a Navy SEAL wrote me an exceptional comment. The book is filled with violence, and here a Navy SEAL wrote a positive comment about it. That SAID SOMETHING to me. Likewise, Faith-Anne has been in working in law for twenty-five years. She hasn’t stayed up all night to read a book for two decades before mine. That’s amazing!

So, I just had to share the comment with you. The book at first seems like it might only appeal to SEALS, Green Beret’s, Paratroopers, Commandos, Rambos,  and others that love a violence-filled book.

I think more people would like it if they gave it a try…

Best of luck and life people,

MF

I couldn’t have said it better. The guy is right on…

If you haven’t already found a genre you’re comfortable and successful writing in, you should strive to write at least nine books this year.

Why nine? Write the following this year and you will be throwing a lot of things up on the wall. The goal as a new writer, I believe, is to see what sticks. See what works. Continue to write whatever works best for you. Maybe you’re a fiction series writer. Maybe a literotica master. You’ll have more data to help you figure out what you are after writing the following.

Write three books about three different topics that you consider yourself expert on.

You might be an expert on the topics already, or, you might become one after a few days or a week of study. I’ve found for myself, and for some other new writers that writing short books of 50-150 pages, focused on a topic that helps people do something, e.g., Moving to Hawaii; Moving to Thailand, does a couple things:

1. Gives you the confidence to write an entire book and publish it. It is very difficult for some new writers to just go ahead and DO IT. Writing a short book on a topic you are expert about, gives you the confidence you need to write other books. Fiction, for instance.

2. Gives you an immediate income stream, whether small or large. I remember selling one of my wife’s Thai cooking ebooks for $40 the first month we put it on the market at her website. Then we sold another, then another. After credit card fees, we had over $110 from sales of her book. That was almost our rent here in Thailand. This initial bit of cash coming in after you write a book that people need, gives you some momentum to go ahead and write other books. Hopefully it sets the stage for a lifetime of writing.

Writing non-fiction help books is fast and probably won’t even take you a month of full-time writing. I’ll finish one here in a couple days that took less than two weeks. When you  know the topic, the book writes itself.

Write 2 fiction books, the second being a sequel to the first.

Books in series – assuming the story is a good one – sell. If you can write 4-5 fiction books in a series this year, then do that. Of course the first book has to set the stage for the series and suck people into your story so deep they never want the books to end. Most of us love a good series. A good series means readers are buying multiple books from you, not just one.

Write 2 erotica books. 

Sex sells, and if you happen to be one of those writers that can craft amazing sex stories – you’ll be loving that moment when you wake up in the morning to check email for sales you made while you slept. I’ve written eight sex-focused books. I’m done in the genre, I can see I plainly do NOT have a knack for it. You might though. Try it and see if readers respond or not. There are some literotica authors making a killing writing short stories – could you be one? Find out.

Write 2 short fiction stories.

Short stories can sell as well as novel-length fiction. At the moment, the $2.99 price-point for fiction novels is hard to beat. Sales are brisk at this price, and readers love getting a book for $3 that, prior to the ebook revolution, cost them $9 or $14.  With short stories, you can write them quickly and price them at $1.99, only a dollar less than full novels. So, write one-quarter to one-half the number of words, and sell them for two-thirds the price of full novels. The math works. It takes a special mind to be able to write amazing shorts. I have yet to try one, but I’ll write at least two of them this year.

Writing nine books in a year might seem like a monumental task. If you want to be successful as a writer, you’ll be writing your ass off in 2013. The time is now.

Needless to say, you shouldn’t be spending your time formatting your book for publication, or creating covers for Smashwords or Amazon. Let someone who is expert at these tasks do them. Send a blank email to list@smashwords.com (auto-responder) to find a group of people that provide ebook covers and book formatting at reasonable prices.