So I just got done writing The Athlete. It is a new short story of mine I am publishing onto the Kindle. It is a little bit longer than The Devil Machine, and much darker.

The story is about two sex addicts who are billionaires, they meet a woman that is not exactly a normal woman and the insanity ensues. They become her slaves and they become destined to take over the world in her name. One of them will be her Athlete, and they soon discover a dark horrific secret of what they have just become a part of.

The story itself is actually a rewrite for me.

I originally wrote The Athlete about a year ago, and it was all done in 1st person. I thought it was fantastic. It was a great tale about cosmic horror, very Lovecraft in its nature. When I started getting excited about publishing on the Kindle, it was the first book that came to mind that I should publish. One cause I liked the story a lot, and two because it was already done and I am terribly lazy.

With that said, I opened up the dust-covered word document and re-read The Athlete. It was not long before I discovered my own horror laid within those archaic pages. My story was horrible! The writing was total shit!

I couldn’t believe it. I guess what they say about writers not being able to see the flaw in their own works is totally true. It took me months before my eyes were no longer the creator’s eyes and were just a reader’s eyes. What a difference that was. So I tore down the entire piece and begun again. This time I wrote in 3rd person and I expanded more on who the characters were and their motivations, I made things far less ambiguous and in many ways far more horrifying.

Overall the story ended up being about 16 pages longer than the original, far more detailed, and a far superior story. This goes to show you, a writer should not throw away a story just because he does not like how the prose turned out. Everything is always possible and malleable in a story of your own making.

I really did not have to change much in terms of story for The Athlete to make it great. What needed to change was the prose, it was far too ambiguous and just did not make sense. For instance, one of the main characters ends up getting hive-mind-like telepathy, but in the original that is never even explained as to why he can see into the minds of his friends. Somethings I am all for leaving totally ambiguous and unexplained, and I did this in the rewritten Athlete.

You have to walk between a fine line in horror. You have to open up the door where the monster is behind but only a little bit, only small little cracks slowly teetering open and spilling out the darkness that awaits behind. If you open the door all the way, you get rid of the REAL monster. No one is afraid of zombies, intergalactic colossal spiders, the monster under your bed or any of that. People are afraid of that door blocking their vision, they are afraid of the unknown.

By leaving a story a little unknown and ambiguous, you actually expand the story tenfold.

Leave the reader in wonder so they may interpret what happens. I cannot tell you how many great ideas I have gotten from readers telling me what they thought about my work.

In the case of the old Athlete, I needed to slap myself in the face. It was literally impossible to tell what was going on constantly throughout the story. Suffice to say, I am extremely happy with how the new Athlete has turned out.

It is currently in the process of being edited by a friend of mine and once it is done, I will shoot you guys an update about the work.

This is something I have been meaning to write. As you all know, I am super into writing fiction. I love everything about it. With
that said, I have published my very first short story for the Kindle publishing platform. The Devil Machine is a haunting tale about a young man confronted with his mentor’s possible mental breakdown as his mentor describes imprisoning the soul of the devil to end all evil in the world.

It is one of my favorite short stories that I have ever written. I am already working on my second short story – The Athlete – which will be coming out soon. My hope is to get 3-4 good size short stories out there on the Kindle and then put them all into an anthology as well. I am playing around with the anthology title being The Something Upstairs.

So how did The Devil Machine fair out there in the open market?

Well… let us go into a little segue here…

How I Got 450 Downloads for My Kindle Short Story in 16 Days

It was actually really easy. Since I am new at this, I am not totally for sure of all the factors that went into making this happen. I will simply recount everything I have done as of yet in terms of promotion.

The first thing I did was have a friend do the cover for me. I am not a graphic designer, nor do I want to pay someone 30-80 bucks to do a cover for me for a short story that only makes me 35 cents a pop. That is something to really think about. Always keep the business of writing at the forefront of your mind.

If you are selling a short story for 99 cents on the Kindle, you only get around 35 cents of that 99. So the margin you have to work with is 35 cents. That is a lot of sales I would have to make to recoup the cost of a 40 dollar graphic design cover. Honestly, I want The Devil Machine to be profitable as quickly as possible – so I opted not hire an actual designer.

For anyone looking for a good designer however, I can always recommend Elance or Odesk to find some good people. I would start off with asking your friends and family first though. You would be surprised how many people know basic graphic design – and they probably will do it for you for free.

Along with having a good cover (Which honestly is not even that great, for some reason once uploaded to the Kindle store it became overly grainy), I also have fan page on facebook for my writing blog (this blog). You can find my writing fan page here and connect with me if you like.

I only have around 34-36 fans at the moment of this writing. Hopefully it will grow as I get a larger fan base. One thing I am doing in all my Kindle short stories is at the very end including links both to this blog and to my fan page. I believe this will help me promote more of my works overtime.

Once The Devil Machine went live, I enrolled it into Amazon Kindle’s sharing program. This allows me to use free promotions from time to time. I am unsure if I promoted the short story for too long or not, something I will definitely be testing as new works of mine come out. However, for the first time I just chose the full 5 day free promotion.

During those 5 days I got the majority of my downloads (438 to be exact). Which is awesome! Since I have no following and am basically a no name in the fiction writing world. Since then, I have been getting a sale here and there – around 1-2 every couple of days.

The momentum is hard to keep up, but I am up for the challenge!

Once the story was published I did another thing I don’t many Kindle authors doing. I went out and got people to review the work. As you can see, the majority of my book has been reviewed favorably so far. This helps me push myself up in Amazon’s algorithm, the more people reviewing my work, the more Amazon will find my work important to show to their visitors.

Honestly, this is all I did to get that many downloads in such a short period of time. I am unsure whether there is a significant amount of downloads or not. I have heard both ends of the story. Some people say it is rather common, others say they are envious. So you can be the judge of that one.

If you would like to check out my short story, you can buy The Devil Machine here.

I have been working very hard this month! Even though I have been gone working in the oil field for the last week and a half (still a few more 12-hour days) I have been able to accomplish some really good stuff.

I got my kindle short story published (The Devil Machine) and did some promotion there. Something I will probably describe more in a later post. As I have
something else that I am really excited to see how it turns out.

A few weeks back I was commissioned to ghostwrite 2 nonfiction ebooks for the Kindle. It got me thinking… why don’t I write a bunch of how-to ebooksas well? After all, anyone who has been around the ideas of information marketing knows that how-to books are the bestsellers almost every time. There is literally hundreds of topics to write on as well – anywhere between making money as a blogger, how to write fiction, repair a car etc. etc.

That got me thinking of another way to make money writing online. A little website known as Infobarrel. For those who are not initiated yet with Infobarrel, they are an adsense revenue sharing website. Similar to eHow or Squidoo, only way the hell better.

What is an adsense revenue sharing website and how does one make money writing for them?

Simple, my friend!

How I Plan to Make Money Writing for Infobarrel

Infobarrel works with you writing articles on any subject and pays you through adsense and other affiliate networks. Say you wrote an article about dog food and got tons of traffic to that article, Google Adsense would display a bunch of relevant ads all around your article. When a reader clicks on one of those Google ads, you make money! Even if the person clicking doesn’t buy a damn thing.

This is the way Google rewards websites who place their Adsense codes on their content. I even have some Adsense running on this blog – in fact almost all my blogs have it. While Infobarrel has a lot of other ways for you to earn money with the written word (Such as through Amazon and Chitika), Google Adsense seems to be the real bread winner here. Not to mention for anyone familiar with SEO, you can use each Infobarrel article as a powerful backlinking source to any website you are currently building or promoting.

The painful part of earning anything with Infobarrel is the article writing. In order for you to see any decent returns, you need to have a lot of articles on the website. These articles need to be between 600 and a 1,000 words. A tall order, especially since to reap the most dollars you will need to write on many different subjects. Many of these subjects you will have to do research to create a good high quality article.

Without quality, the article simply will not earn anything. It might not even be accepted by Infobarrel guidelines (more power to them).

In order to achieve anything worthwhile you will need at least a hundred to three-hundred of these articles written and promoted. That takes a lot of time. A lot of time I really don’t have. I am working in the oil fields right now, working 12 hours a day to make my scratch and I just cannot afford to spend so much time writing these articles. If I was to do it myself, it would probably take me close to five months to hit the three-hundred article goal. That is not even counting all the time it will take to promote all of these articles with their own backlinks (which requires even MORE articles for each of my Infobarrel article, since I cannot just copy and paste the articles onto other websites – duplicate content is a big no, no).

So if Infobarrel is so much of a pain in the ass, why spend time at all doing it? Simple!

Once you do get those 300+ currency making articles online and promoted, you have built a passive income machine. At the end of 6 months, having all 300 articles written and promoted, I am looking at making an extra $500 to $1,000 dollars a month as my initial goal. It will be difficult, yet I believe achievable. Hopefully I can make this project into a case study as I grow my content on the website.

Even still, the passive income is not enough to attract me wholeheartedly to putting in the back breaking effort of actually doing this. That is why I have turned to one of my biggest heroes in business (and well, in most things) Mr. Tim Ferris.

Tim Ferris and My Personal Army of the Literati

Since I have a lot of projects that have WAY better Return on Investment than writing 300 articles for Infobarrel, I decided to be lazy and work smarter instead of harder.

I have no time between my day job and my other projects (local seo, kindle fiction, niche affiliate websites, and formulating a plan for an iPhone app company down the road) to actually do this. Yet I want to for the simple reason that I know Infobarrel works. It works way better than eHow ever did, and pays way more than Squidoo ever will. All the while it is a stand up, extremely transparent company.

I know some people report making 500 to even 3,000 dollars every single month on autopilot with the website. That’s something I don’t want to ignore. The solution was so simple too…

Enter Mr. Tim Ferris of The 4-Hour Workweek and The 4-Hour Body fame, perhaps the 2 greatest books on self-potential I have ever read.

I was re-reading The 4-Hour Workweek on my flight back to the arctic circle to do more worship at the Oil God’s Temple, when it dawned on me. For the first time really in my life, I am making enough money where I could finally follow Tim’s advice on outsourcing your life. He has a whole chapter all about outsourcing, which is one of my favorite chapters. He gives a list of companies, ideas of things to outsource and how exactly to go about delegating the tasks to your new contractors.

Suffice to say, it was easy enough to browse on Elance.com for a writer that charged only $3.00 an article. It was a lot harder to find a writer who had the skills to actually make the articles high quality. There were very few American writers willing to be paid so low, and the ones who were willing, I just didn’t want to hire them.

The reasoning being is that I need someone who is going to put in A LOT of time into these articles. To someone in my own country, they would probably end up getting burnt out fairly quickly.

Since I want someone for the long-haul (I have another outsourcing project I’ll touch on in a moment), I took a trip to India via Elance. That is where I found and struck gold! I found a writer with perfect English, with a lot of examples of his article writing ability. As an added bonus, he knew SEO. Cool.

I was deciding between him and a company that had tons of writers working for them. He was charging $3, and they were charging $4. I liked the idea of a company just in case my guy ever got sick or under the weather in anyway, I would still have someone working on my projects. That is when he sent me a message telling me he has 25 writers working underneath him.

This was awesome!

My own army of writers... willing to take on the burden of researching anything I desire...

I immediately hired him and set him up with the first 7 articles. All of which should be done by tomorrow. He wanted to do all 300 (Actually 900 articles due to the articles I need to promote the 300 articles) in merely a month. As great as that sounded, I simply just do not have that kind of cash to invest upfront with. So we are taking it slow at 25-50 batches a month. (Or 75 to 150 articles a month, since each money making article will have 3 corresponding articles for marketing purposes).

This frees up my time to do the really important things that really matter in this type of work.

The marketing! I can focus my efforts not on painful research of topics and writing about things I could care less about, and instead focus on keyword research and SEO. The keyword research part is always tricky and I am getting the handle on it. I will probably discuss more how I am doing my keyword research later if my articles start becoming successful.

Not to mention I will also have MORE time to do my passion of writing fiction for the Kindle. So far The Devil Machine is doing great, sitting at 446 downloads in its first 11 days. I have another short story called The Athlete coming out as well here soon. Probably a little bit after my hitch at work is done in another 5 days.

If you have yet to get Tim Ferri’s award-winning book The 4-Hour Workweek, I highly recommend it. (Note that is an affiliate link, if you prefer not to support me, don’t buy it through that link!)

After all, this is just one of the MANY awesome ideas in that book. And I know this is just going be great. Even if the person I hired doesn’t work out, I can always hire another person. It creates a real bit of leverage for me, and just makes me feel more like a professional entrepreneur in its own way. (Whoa, I’m a boss, I hate having bosses but kind of like being a boss).

By the way, you can signup for Infobarrel here. Again, if you don’t want to support me don’t click there to signup for it (even though it’s free). Infobarrel has this cool feature that anyone who signs up with your referrer link you actually get 2% of their adsense revenue (Not taken from your 75% protion that the website gives you, but from their 25% that they pay to themselves).

Get a bunch of people signed up and gun-ho about earning money from their writing on Infobarrel, and you can reap some pretty cool rewards with literally doing nothing. I doubt the referrals will really contribute much if anything at all to my overall income with the adsense revenue sharing website, but you never know.

The Other Marching Orders of My Army-to-Be…

If these 25 writers work out with writing good high quality Infobarrel articles for me, it won’t stop just there. Since I personally know the power of the Kindle ebooks, I know I will need to explore them more using outsourced help. As I said early, anyone who knows about information marketing knows that How-To books are usually the most profitable to write and market.

Again, most of them are on subjects I really could care less about – or just have no clue about at all. Yeah it is fun learning, but it is more fun learning about a subject in a book format versus doing all the research. I really hate research – especially if I am not passionate about the subject.

That is why I am going have my army of writers do it for me. While I pump out fiction underneath my own name, I will also create a pen name that sells how-to books. I plan on writing 50 how-to books altogether as a good starting number. Of course when I say I plan on writing them, I really mean my writers.

Like the articles, I will promote each of them using various methods of SEO, social media and other avenues of intrigue.

This project is still relatively far away from happening, since I need to see first what these writers are capable of and how fast they can really push out quality content for me. My hopes are high alas! I am especially looking forward to blogging more on the results of my Tim Ferris outsourcing experience. Even looking more forward to when Infobarrel and these How-To ebooks start becoming a Muse for me – automated passive income.

Allowing me again to lead my wandering lifestyle.

I really miss the open road. I believe in someway, all writers have an obsessive lust with travel and the world. After all, we are the ones who describe the world to everyone else. At the moment, I must wait and see what happens before I can go pretend I am Jack Kerouac again on a grand adventure.

No worries though. I will keep you posted on the journey

I have gotten 2 commissioned ebooks up and done now since I started looking for work as a writer. Also I have written several articlesalready for The Content Authority already. Mainly all on subjects I really do not find that fascinating. I mean, one article was about a ball float valve in your toilet. Not exactly glamorous work that people usually associate with being a writer.

But hey, you got to take them as they come. When you are just starting out in this type of a field, sometimes you have to take projects you are not overly enthused about. For instance, I was writing an ebook and the last 10 pages of the commissioned work were just so hard for me. Yet I figured out a solution that works for me.

When I am writing an ebook or an article that I am not fascinated with, I will take a break to work on other parts of my business. So instead of putting together a 100 page ebook about cup making in one sitting, you may instead break it up. Say every 10 pages, or do it via time increments. Every thirty minutes you stop, take a ten minute break, when you come back you work on other parts of your writing business.

Some of the things I have done to change things up are:

Write on my fiction (In 30 minute blocks minimum).

Work on a different project altogether such as my two affiliate websites.

Write some articles for my lead generation. Such as the work I am doing for the website Leads2LocalSearch, a platform for businesses to dominate their local communities online using advanced SEO and social media. This is something I am heavily promoting right now actually and working towards. I know once I land a few clients, that my business will take off in a big way. Especially because I know the value I can offer each and every client is amazing.

Storming Ahead…

Regardless of what you do, sometimes it just sucks writing in a subject you dislike or just don’t know a whole lot about. Personally, I am not a huge fan of researching. I can do it well, but it doesn’t mean I enjoy it. If I can write something I know about, I can pump it out 500% quicker than if it is something I have to keep stopping and researching dates, names or terminology I am unfamiliar with.

This is a major reason why I do not do journalism very well.

Sometimes, you just have to storm ahead. Sit down and do the work. Because the work can lead to a lot of benefits. It could land you a big writing contract with something you actually enjoy. Or it could lead to several referrals.

It is definitely shitty starting off doing the writing gigs that are only paying you pennies on the dollar. Just keep at it. Look at it as a way to refine your skills and researching habits. And maybe even increase your typing speed if that is one of your issues as a writer.

(Increasing typing speed by the way vastly improves how much you earn. You can pump out your product way quicker. I personally type between 100-110 WPM and I know it has been a huge benefit for me in the little time I have been doing commissioned work).

The Feeling of Freedom…

The best part about writing an ebook or an article you dislike is finishing it! It feels amazing! To know you were able to sit down with some real determination and pump something out, tells you something about yourself. That you can things done, even if it sucks doing it. Of course the other reason why it feels amazing to get done with a project like this is that you are now about to get paid.

I keep a folder on my computer of everything I have accomplished. Of course since I am just starting my business, this is pretty limited amount of completed work, but still it builds confidence in me. Every new project I take on is a chance for me to learn something brand new about myself or about a new subject.

For instance, writing for The Content Authority has actually given me a veritable list of niches I never thought about before. Which, all in all is pretty damn cool in my opinion.

Use this portion strategy of mine. Take frequent breaks, go off and do something else that you are passionate and excited about. After all, doing these type of jobs is only the starting phase of a really cool career in writing. There will come a time when the only projects you work on are ones you are actually interested in, since you will have built a name for yourself.

Or like my plan is… the things I am doing to build passive writing income will overtake my active writing income.

Well, I better shut up and get back to work. Talk to you guys later.

I got a pretty lame start to February. In fact only have been able to work online for the last 2 days or so. Yet, I have accomplished quite a

This month, I try to court the internet into sending me a paycheck! Happy V-Day

bit! Over 8,000 words typed up for various niches, and redesigned two websites.

I think I would like to start a monthly report, kind of similar to Pat Flynn’s SmartPassiveIncome income reports he has over on his website. (Great website by the way for anyone looking to make money online, whether it is through writing or whatever the heck you want).

So this will be my attempt at doing just that!

First, a breakdown of the projects I am currently working on.

Writing Projects in February

Due to the nature of marketing in tight niches, I am probably not going to reveal my actual niches to cut down on any competition that may arrive. Most of these projects by the way are brand new, thus they have no real income coming to them for me to really report just yet. By the end of next month I will probably have a report on where things are sitting at income-wise.

The Content Authority $6.00

I was hopping around over on Problogger.net looking at their job board when I discovered this. It is a pretty neat little program they got going over there. Basically you go and sign up with them, they review your application and choose whether to accept or deny you.

If they accept you (Which I imagine they accept the majority of writers) you can start writing immediately for profit.

For people who need the money NOW, this may be a short term solution for you. Just do not expect to earn too much unless you put in a lot of work. I wrote 3 articles today on Content Authority for around 6 bucks. As you gain more recognition though you can travel through various Tiers. I am only Tier 1 so I get paid $0.007 per a word I type.

Not so great if you live in America. But there is a long-term possibility of me picking up copywriting and seo clients down the road. It is also an interesting way to discover new niches you would never had thought about in a thousand years.

For instance,  I wrote about toilet ball valves today for them. Had no idea what a float ball even was until I researched the article.

Having to research and do a good job is probably the biggest reason why the Content Authority is not going be a major income player for me. It just can’t pay out enough in a scalable way where it is worth to spend all that time writing the article. But it has other benefits like I said.

If you want some quick small cash, check out The Content Authority here.

Local SEO and Social Media Partnership

I recently partnered with my friend Brandon Connell of the famed BrandonConnel.com Make Money Blogging blog. Which I think is really going to go somewhere. Today I wrote 5 articles, 4 of which have now successfully been published to my Ezinearticle account. I couldn’t publish all of them as I am waiting for my membership to be upgraded to Diamond.

I have extreme high hopes for this ongoing project and I think it is going to bring in some really awesome writing income for me down the road. Working with Brandon is always pretty awesome too, since I am learning a lot as I go and gaining more confidence in writing online,.

Niche Site #1 (Hobby Niche)

I won’t reveal the actual niche, but I’ll reveal the general Big Four of what it is in. I am having a blast with this website. I just recently redid the ENTIRE website using the Flexibility S3 theme (Same theme that this blog is operating on) and am really enjoying the fresh new look.

Got rid of the cheesy banner I had up on there. Now I need to create a cool sleek banner for the site. Also have to create an RSS feed/newsletter still for it.

I wrote a new blog post breathing life back through it. I am primarily making money on this website right now from Amazon’s associates program. However, since it is so erratic and I just started breathing life back into the project, there is nothing to report.

However, I am still ranked quite high for my primary keyword which is awesome! It’s been months since I’ve touched the website or even looked at it and still ranking on the 1st page of Google. Always a really nice feeling!

It is still a shame I made a fatal error of doing poor keyword research with the website. The main keyword I was going for I was underneath the impression it over 30,000 hits a month. Turns out that number is closer to 14,000.  This would not be a problem if I had not done an exact domain match with the keyword.

Alas, oh well. What is done is done, right?

It will still rank well for other keywords. It was actually really frustrating when I found out about it, it was part of the reason why I shelved the project. Yet it still makes sales for me here and there. So I figured there could be quite a lot of potential actually in it.

I just put Adsense blocks, new Amazon widgets, and of course linking to Amazon products within the post. I also have plans of launching a forum on the website that could lead to some good potential profits down the road. If I can make the forum actually look decent – as right now it looks very crappy indeed.

I have a future plan for an ebook as well if I can start building more traffic towards it.

So right now just focusing on back linking for various keywords and keeping the website updated at this point with relevant content.

Niche Site #2 (Health & Personal Care)

This website was in the same boat as my first niche site above. Redid the ENTIRE appearance of the website. Which any blogger knows, has the potential of being a major time dump.

This website has always given me more trouble to write in – even though it is a far more profitable niche – simply because I have never been overly interested in the niche. I create the website as a means of expanding my Amazon website network. The Amazon associates program dishes out higher commissions if you sell over certain amounts of products.

My strategy so far has been to have one website that has low-end priced goods, and another website that has higher-priced goods.

If I can consistently break the quantity limitation, than my higher-priced goods websites will garner me a lot of extra money for hardly any extra effort. (Always a good thing, right?)

I am happy to say though the website look 500% better than what it use to look like. It is still getting organic search traffic too even though I have never built a single back link to it as of yet.

I am planning on changing that by commenting on relevant blogs and writing more articles for Web 2.0 sites (a favored back linking strategy for us seo guys.)

All in all, I think the website has potential, it has made 1 sale in its existence so that gives me some motivation. Considering I have barely ever touched the website, I am curious what could happen if I actually do start working on it!

The niche is unfortunately not big on the idea of newsletters nor social media as the topic would not do well in either medium. So it is going be a lot more seo-driven in terms of marketing than anything else. However, I do have an idea for an ebook I could sell for over 30 bucks that I believe would do extremely well once I begin seeing higher traffic to the website.

Kindle Project

Ironically, I restarted this website as a way for me to get back into fiction writing. I got really excited a few weeks ago about publishing ebooks on the Kindle. To me it just makes so much sense. I am really looking forward to getting my first ever fiction story out there into the market place and doing some advertising for it.

In fact if you join my Facebook fan page here on Gregthewriter.com you can stay more in the loop of my fiction pursuits.

I have my first story done up and editted. It is a Scifi horror named The Devil Machine – so keep an eye out for all you horror fans. It should be up in a few days. All I need to do is research how to format in Open Office for the Kindle since I don’t use Pages nor Microsoft Word (And don’t own either).

If anyone knows how to do this, let me know.

I could just put them into a PDF. Alas the last time I did that, it just did not look that great. So I need to figure out some good spacing, or just in general how to make it look better than it is currently. Once that is done it is off to the races!

Speaking of The Devil Machine, I am actually writing the 3rd story in the little short story trilogy. The sequel is a novel, and I just want to focus on short stories at the moment to get out some product that I can promote heavily.

One thing that will be definitely interesting is to see how much income potential there really is for $0.99 short stories.

Guess only time will tell!

There is a few other fiction projects I have storming in my head, however those far into the future so I am not going talk about them just as of yet.

Conclusion

So for a total of 2 days being back and kicking it online  - internet marketing style – I have made a grand total of 6 bucks. No worries, I am a wise investor, I will not spend it all in one place!

A lot of these projects won’t pay off till down the road. I am hopeful though. Because once these projects start paying, they will more or less be passive on my end save for things like Content Authority. I am all about passive income, it is my favorite form of income.

I am pretty sure it is everyone’s favorite form. Who doesn’t want to get paid while they are sleeping after-all, right?

With that said, boldly going forward to finish the month off strong before I had back to a day job in a couple of weeks.

My hats off to yah and… good night… it’s 4:30 am and I have been writing all night. Time for me to do something a little different, such as sleep. Well, maybe one more article…

Gross Income So Far in February: $6.00

(Remember this page, if all goes well it’ll be funny to look back and compare the drastic differences in income. Definitely a day I am looking forward to)

The dark sound clamored all around. Something awful had began here. Herman J. Frost stood at the epicenter of it all. He found himself disorientated, he did not know where he was. Everything was blacker than night, he reached his hands out and saw nothing.

What’s happening to me? Am I dying? He thought of those times when he used to get heat exhaustion. Those scary, scary times when he lost his already considerably poor vision. How it went in and out, playing peek-a-boo with his mind. How colors changed from the myriad of the rainbow, to the dismal of a 1940s black and white movie.

The sound kept on humming. Such a sound.

“Hello?” His voice sound so weak, so pathetic.

The world seem to inhale, affected in some malignant way by Herman’s greeting.

“I can’t see anything, help me!” He yelled out.

“It’s okay,” Came a soothing voice. “It’s all going be okay.”

The voice sounded so nice, so thrilling, so familiar. Welcoming and homely. Is it her? Herman contemplated. No, she’s been gone far too long. Not her. An apparition.

“What’s happening to me?” Herman asked.

He could hear her step closer, “It’s okay Herman. It really is. Okay? It could be fun being blind. It really could. I mean, just imagine all those new things you get to experience. Well, I am almost just envious of you!”

“What do you–”

“Seriously,” She interrupted. God that voice! That voice, so calming and beautiful and wonderful! That fucking voice! “Imagine how sounds will be to you soon. Your hearing will finely be fine-tuned. Your other senses got to compensate for your vision you know. Food will taste amazing, the flavor just popping in your mouth, the textures rolling over your tongue. Yes, it really could be fun to be blind.”

“Why do you keep saying that? Why is it so dark in here?” Herman stepped forward, toward that sound. That fucking voice! No, not her, no not now. “What is happening to me? Please…”

“Everything is going to be okay,” She said, a perfect mimicry of an old lie. “Trust me, okay? Like I said, I am envious. Going blind could be really fun if you think about it. Yes, really fun.”

A wind rushed over Herman, and he felt it hit on places he’s never felt before upon his face. A deep sickness overwhelmed him. Like a snake, or a giant worm, slowly moving its black cankerous lithe form through his body. Slowly gnawing at his organs – eating his vitals – taking him away. That fucking voice!

He slowly began to raise his arms, how heavy and dumb they felt! How used up they were! Using muscles that no longer existed, in its place just the emaciated disease clump of the soon-to-be-dead, he reached for his face.

His fingers explored, trembled across a horrible new territory. The wind whipped, guiding him to the morbid realization.

“Everything is going to be okay,” She said soothingly.

“”Hello? Oh there you are,” Came a new voice from the inscrutable black. A man’s voice. A familiar voice.

THAT FUCKING VOICE.

Herman J. Frost’s fingers plunged into the empty sockets of his eyes old home. He screamed out in that unrelenting black. He screamed until it pierced the dark, until his screams took him back to his bed in a shivering, cold sweat.

Just a dream. Just a dream.

Herman sat up in his bed, his breathing came quickly – emotionally, “Everything is okay. No, no, no.”

Don’t tell me that again. Don’t speak of that again.

Herman bent his head in shame, and he cried in his callused palms. Those same palms who once promised of greatness, yeah of that sacred glory we all dream for ourselves. Yet in the dark of a small bedroom, they only secretly whispered that ancient lie.

Everything is okay.

Nothing was okay.

He sauntered on the edge of something. He looked out into the night, trembling, shivering, in a deep sort of awful wondering. Cars past on by, each a little cell block containing an individual who knew not of his pain – of his agony.

That agony that was without end.

He often sat herein his kitchen with a sink full of decaying dishes, the weeks-old fetid smell blanketing the air, in just such a way. Up on a bar stool whose hinges had started to creak, whose legs had become wobbly in decrepit age.

“Nobody plans to fail, they just fail to plan,” He muttered. A grim tagline he had picked up from his last industrial rendezvous – but he had planned. So what was wrong with him? “Herman J. Frost, age 33, too poor for cold medicine, but still rich enough to dream.”

A cough came out of the recesses of his tar-filled lungs. The cigarette was already done, they always ended too quickly, he never could get his fix anymore. What was that word they had for people like him? Oh yeah, chain smoker.

Father would be proud.

The thought was sarcastic, but his father was indeed proud. Proud that his son made an amiable living, proud that his son wore a hard hat and steel toe shoes, proud that he was “learning while he was earning”.

Herman wasn’t proud of anything.

For fifteen years he had been at it, trying to get out of the Dark Box. But all he did was screw up, or get screwed – you see Herman had a lot of problems. Many of which he did not want to contemplate right now as he watched the cars go from his rancid kitchen.

He wondered what kind of a life they lived. He wondered if he would ever get out of the Dark Box. That place where everything is so black that everything seems alright, but only because you cannot see the monsters. You cannot see the crazed beasts whom with their muted throats gnashed claw-like teeth in starvation. Creatures just waiting to move in close enough, to take you down, make you into a cripple before the final feast.

That’s when they get you, Herman thought, when you become a cripple the dreams just ebb away.

He had some fight left in him. He wasn’t ready to submit himself to the Dark Box just yet. He knew the problem, hell, Herman J. Frost even knew how to fix the problem. Which said a great deal about him – he had known of the cancerous problem for years and knew its cause. He could fix it anytime he would like, but he never did.

He just watched cars go by, alone in his kitchen with a cowboy killer alit in his mouth. Good ol’ buddy Marlboro would still hear his sob story.

And why not? The cowboy killers were going to help create a sob story for his friends and family in a few more decades of heavy smoking. Least the bastards could do would listen to Herman’s constant whine about his seemingly failed destiny.

Shaking these thoughts away, he picked up a pen and began again

“Once upon a time,” He wrote. Suddenly, disgusted with himself he got up and left the kitchen. “Jesus that’s horrible.”

Instead of writing his grand piece, he went instead and warmed up a corn dog. One of those cheap corn dogs you can get in 18-packs at your local grocery store. He opened up a can of generic citrus-flavored soda and prepared himself for a lovely meal for one.

As his cuisine baked in radiation, Herman plopped on his dilapidated couch. The TV was boring,  but it worked well as a siren song for Herman. The Dark Box often played the TV hum, leading Herman away from his ambitions once more. Telling him sweetly that this will be just a momentary minute of his life dedicated to the self-destruction known better as sloth, as laziness, as procrastination.

He justified it. Herman promised himself he would write two-thousand words tomorrow. The Dark Box agreed with Herman, but why not four-thousand words? Then he could have even more days off to slack in front of the TV-siren-song.

It sounded so good, Herman immediately agreed with the verbal contract.

Again the Dark Box won, after-all, how often do tomorrow’s really come?

-

Being a writer is being a different breed of a person. However, I definitely cannot see most people who say they are a writer and take them seriously. Most people would like to think they are indeed a writer, a forger of worlds, a weaver of souls of various characters – but they most assuredly are not.

A lot of people just say it for the shock value. As some great sign of how deep of a person they are, how far their soul delves in the good ol’ intellectual spirit. Most of these people are idiots.

Now some real writers are also idiots, so being a writer doesn’t exactly make you smart. Yet being a true writer does make you a very different person from the norm.

One thing is for certain, you are far more creative than the majority of people. Ideas pop into your mind all the time. Stories, settings, backgrounds, people you never met that urge you to write about them, or desperately plea with you to give them life.

And of course you oblige, you offer these poor souls a devil’s bargain. For a fee you will bring them to life, but you will only give them life within the constraints of the pages that you put ink to, forever entrapped and entombed with eternal life between the binds of a book.

This whole process to me is amazingly beautiful.

I have created characters, and this may sound insane, that make me feel like they are more realistic than some of my actual real life friends. It is when you no longer accept a character you have created as a character but rather a real person that you know you did something very interesting.

Another note of observation that I have noticed with writers, is that we tend to observe a lot more things in our surroundings.

I am not saying we are more detail-oriented, because I could miss a painted elephant on brick wall just by walking by it, seriously I am horrible with details. What I am good at though, is seeing the overall picture of things. I can read in between the lines, and this inherent natural ability to do so I believe is truly part of the writer nature.

After all, I sincerely doubt that the majority of writers thought about tropes, themes, theories, and symbolism as they wrote the majority of their pieces of fiction. However, all these things are there in plenty.

I remember in 10th grade English when I learned about the idea of symbolism. It blew me away. I never even had a conscious thought of it. It stressed me out as I thought about my masterpiece, about how stupid it must be since I didn’t know anything about symbolism.

It was only a couple of weeks later, looking at my beloved story, that I realized the symbolism had been there all along. It opened up my story in a plethora of new and fascinating ways that I never thought existed. Yet naturally, untrained, I put those very same symbols in there to be found by those with eyes to see.

In so many ways I believe a writer is a natural-born gift that belongs to the creative.

However, all these things can be learned too I believe. As I still think every single person has it in them to write a book about something. It does not mean that their book will necessarily be good of course alas!

The biggest thing I could tell anyone who really wants to become a writer is to look at themselves, look deep into themselves and ask questions. Challenge all your beliefs, become all too familiar as to why you have those beliefs, be honest with yourself too. For these complex inner dialogues can give you a great insight into characters you come up with, even if you never answer the reader as to why your characters believe in what they do, you will know and be able to detail all their actions with the answer.

Along with this, look at writing as a rushing river battling against the hard wrought walls of a dam.

Every time I view my skill growing as a writer, I look at more water being added to that river, more pressure being applied against that dam. Then one day that dam comes crashing down and the river bursts through in a magnificent sudden and powerful roar.

It whistles and roars and screams down the valley and floods the land with its might.

That is, until it reaches another dam!

Then it is back to adding more water and pressure slowly to break away at that barrier.

That is how it always has been for me. Small little increases in improvement, whether it be grammar, character building, story, symbols or what have you. Eventually all these small little improvements create a monumental storm that brings forth a great epiphany.

And that epiphany is what makes it worthwhile.

My two most notable improvements in my writing is when I learned about symbolism in 10th grade, and then again in 12th grade when I learned about being able to read in between the lines in a novel. In other words I could see what was going on in the background even though the author never actually physically said what was happening.

Writing is a constantly evolving skill, the more you do it, the better you will get.

If you wish to become a writer, remember to practice constantly at writing stories.

For every ten shitty stores I write, I come up with at least one gem. (For poems, I create a lot more shitty poems than ever a gem haha).

Never give up, and keep striving and growing your creativity. And one day as you look back on yourself, you will noticed, you too have become an outsider to this world, an observer of its deeper places, and realize you have become a writer in true.