Signs of Aging.

'Snobserver,' Wiki Commons.

You know you’re getting old when you wake up one day and you have no hair on your feet. One of the very first signs of aging is when you come home and find fifty pink flamingoes on your lawn, and you’re not even Italian. When you go to write a singles ad, and all you can come up with is, “Man with no future seeks woman with no past.”

You are old.

When you need a pill to get it up; and your biggest worry is, ‘uncontrolled priapism that lasts more than four hours.’

What are you so worried about? Word gets around, and sooner or later they’ll be beating a path to your door.

Oh, God, you know you’re getting old when attractive women start to call you sir.

When your buddy asks: “Are you up for it?”

And you just say, “No!”

When you engage telemarketers in idle conversation, you’re getting old. You know you’re getting old when beer just makes you sleepy and you can’t stand your own music.

You’re getting old when you try to get out at least once a week—as long as it’s free.

(If there’s free coffee and donuts, you invite a friend.)

You’re getting old when you have a few beers and all you can do is complain about peeing. When pudgy forty-five year olds start to look good, you’re old. You know you’re getting old when the doctor has to tell you to whack off once a day, and you keep coming up with excuses: “If my wife catches me, she’ll say, ‘if you have so much energy why won’t you help me paint the dining room?’”

Yes, when the doctor tells you, “The left hand is a stranger,” your doctor is also getting old and just a little creepy, too.

Buddy, you’re getting old when you need your reading glasses to roll a joint and when you make a special day to go out to shop for socks and underwear. You’re getting old when you go to the supermarket once a day whether you need anything or not. When you suddenly realize that young people today just piss you off, you’re old.

When you start reading the obituaries, and all your friends are in there, you’re right to be concerned. That’s because you’re old too. You’re just not dead yet. Don’t worry, you’ll know when it happens. It will be in the paper.

It’s not up to me to say whether you’re getting old or not.

You know yourself best.


This story appeared previously in defenestration magazine.


Editor’s Note: I was looking at a photo of Andre Agassi on Wiki, which I could have used given the attribution/Commons License. In reading the license, I came across the term ‘personality rights.’ While parody has a fair latitude, and no disrespect would have been intended, the content might have been misunderstood.

Due to the egregious nature of this content I have elected to go with an anonymous model. Moral rights do require consideration and we are now aware of this issue. Thanks for listening.

Setting up Pen-Names.

Interact with a new audience or readership.

At first, setting up a few pen names seems more trouble than it’s worth. We’re sort of taking it on faith that we are planting some long-living electronic seeds that will bear fruit far into the future. These seeds will have to be nurtured, so that they may grow big and strong. Each pen name only starts off with one or two products, and I’ve been building the Shalako brand for maybe three and a half years now already...


Clearly the whole process is going to take some time. The rest of my life in all probability.

One reason for a pen name is simple author bad vibes. If someone decides they don’t much like Louis Bertrand Shalako, which they have every right to do, there is little chance of them buying a book. Yet their negative perceptions don’t carry over to the next author they look at. When they see my thriller by Nicky Krappazoli, they have no idea that’s me. They’ll read the blurb and look at the cover with an open mind. Nick gets an even break where I might not. By disassociation, none of the bad vibes carry over.

In the short term, Nicky Krappazoli (thrillers and crime for example) hasn’t sold a book. It took a disproportionate amount of time to sign him up for Smashwords, Amazon, Twitter, and LinkedIn and Facebook. All you have to do is put your proper payment information on the publishing platform payment pages. It’s not that difficult to get an e-mail address and set up each character with his own password, and ultimately his or her complete network.

The worst part is getting them started on the social networks which have certain hurdles to get through.

A couple of points. While I’m not fond of total reliance on ‘passive discoverability,’ the fact is that I have sold books in New Zealand through an iTunes store, and I have sold a book in Japan through Kobo. I’m not doing any targeted promotion there that I know of, and yet we have a few followers on Twitter. Some of them no doubt find me fascinating and one or two might live in the Antipodes or the Land of the Rising Sun. Yet it could also be the effect of simply being there, in that store, when that particular customer was browsing. They saw it and they liked it. Maybe they simply didn’t know any better and took a chance.

Now, pen name number two, Astor Fondue, sold a book on Smashwords and one on Amazon within a few hours of publication. Another name, Ludmilla Getonanov, (she’s doing erotica of the raunchy variety) sold a book, but it took her about a week. Those books might sell the odd copy in stores all over the world. Once you have more than one book out, the only thing that matters is total sales. Same with pen-names. The only thing that matters is total sales. I don’t care who is whom and whom is what.

Put some meat on them bones. Hell,
you can even be better looking.

While I am not fond of ‘passive discoverability’ I am also not that big a fan of the total spam blitzkrieg, where you will politely tweet me every seven minutes for the rest of my life how you will get me another 2,000 followers for only $29.95. If only I knew exactly the correct balance.

The world would beat a path to my hut.

Here’s a bit of a problem with pen-names.

They don’t have an e-mail list. They don’t know anybody, and so they have to crack into Facebook and LinkedIn without the benefit of actually having a life! If you friend yourself, you can raid your own friend’s list, and click like on your own stuff, and share things back and forth with different audiences, etc. Whether you try to friend all the same people or extend a whole new network into areas unexploited is again a question of balance. I’m not competing against myself in the same genres, so whole new audiences are called for.

If we are writing fiction, then we are inventing characters anyway. Now we extend that idea to our pen names. Each is an individual, with unique hopes, dreams and desires. They have certain unique challenges. They exist, in a sense, in the minds of other people they interact with.

Assuming you’re not using your own picture, the better written your pen names are, the more likely people are to respond in a positive way, by reading the blog, clicking the links, and ultimately buying a book.

I think of it in broadcasting terms, although it can be so much more intimate than that. But what I have done is to create certain specialty channels. They are tuned to a particular and specific audience. This makes it so much easier to write, and I’ll tell you why.

Because now I’m not trying to please everyone, and appeal to every taste in a book that inevitably pays too close attention to tropes and tripe.

If you figure out who you’re writing for, you can now start learning, by trial and error, how to write the sort of book that someone like that might actually read.

Getting inside of the head of any character and bringing them to life is an art in itself. Being four different people in one day is kind of fun too; although sometimes I do get tired.

Here is my original post on this subject.

I’ve been working towards this goal for many years: ‘The Entity.’

Excerpt. Whack 'Em and Stack 'Em, a WIP.



Morguefile.




Fairweather Nature Park Estates was located in a secluded area of southern Ontario.

Right next door to a plethora of heavily-populated bedroom communities and a nexus of highway nodes, commuting to and from the city was a snap at forty minutes or so. The sight of athletic Roscoe Burgess, looking good in the Armani suit and Gucci loafers, wearing Italian underwear and even an Italian aftershave when he thought about it, was nothing unusual in what was a pretty affluent little trailer park. He went about forty feet down the sidewalk.

Turning, he stood and watched for a moment as if waiting for the place to blow up. Not today, apparently, which was a good thing, by any rational standard. He liked to prepare himself in order to dive away from it at a climactic moment. It was this sort of thing that made reputations.

But the suspense was killing him…with a shrug, he turned and continued on his way.

“Good morning, Roscoe!”

“Good morning, Mrs. Beauvais.”

The cheerful calls rang all up and down along the sidewalk leading to Visitor Parking. The denizens, many older but with a few students and young families too, plus quite a number whose lives were complicated or they were exploring alternative lifestyles, were pretty laid-back. It seemed watering the postage-stamp of a lawn or even raking the heavily landscaped gravel terrain that some favoured was a morning ritual.

This fine Monday morning, sunny and unseasonably not snowing, the Firm had sent a car to pick him up, by which and the preceding phone call, he deduced that he was getting another assignment. He opened the door of the domestic sedan and looked in at the strange woman driving. There really was no other kind, as his father once said.

“Hi.”

“Hi.” She waited until he was belted in and the door closed before setting off.

It was better than the ones who nailed the throttle the second your left buttock hit the seat pad and drove like there was no tomorrow. She was smooth but aggressive when she got going. The way people drove said a lot about them. One intern, he recalled, took the company car on a gopher everyone else in the office while you’re out type coffee run and never came back. The car was eventually found abandoned in Sri Lanka, in the hills overlooking Trincomalee Harbour and not too far from where Arthur C. Clarke used to live.

“So.”

She looked over.

“Traffic’s light, and we’ll be there in plenty of time for the meeting.”

He nodded. The Monday briefing was a tradition, and when the workload was light, senior executives were expected to participate. That was one reason overseas assignments, no matter how short the duration, were highly prized and the stuff of contention amongst senior staff. Being at a meeting meant not just being there, but contributing. He didn’t have anything to contribute, but that had never surprised anyone before.

“Talkative, aren’t you?”

“Huh?” He gave her a blank look. “Sorry. It’s just that meetings are the bane of my existence.”

He’d been saving that line for somebody, why not use it?

She smiled knowingly, causing him to wonder just what she did know. She wasn’t bad looking in a hosey sort of a way, with long, straight, pitch-black hair, pale creamy skin like candy and those impossibly clear blue eyes. It was the fashion sense more than anything. She had black nail polish on at both ends for God’s sakes and was heavy on the mascara to boot. Her lashes were thick and attractively curly though.

“I’m Suzie.”

“Roscoe.”

They shook hands awkwardly. Her shoes had what looked like ankle cuffs and chains, with heels three or four inches long…he quite liked the wrist guards. Her aroma was spicy and enticing, like cinnamon toast and green marmalade. It looked like being one of them days, horny as a ten-peckered Billy goat and no real prospects as she was a fellow employee. Maybe he should wrangle some kind of overseas assignment…his garden was in, and the peas were coming up already.

“Yes, I hear you’re the man of action.”

She wasn’t an intern then, even with the stud in her right nostril and the multiple rings on every finger. He wondered if she had pierced her labia or anything like that. He was just about to ask when she interrupted him. Interns were like mushrooms, keep them in the dark and feed them nothing but bullshit. Yet this one clearly knew something about him.

“Can I ask a personal question?”

“What? Oh, sure. Fire away, young lady.” If this was the sort of thing graduating from the training schools these days then the world was just in a whole heap of trouble.

“What’s with all the naked people?” She gave him a long look of assessment as they cruised down the 401 at a steady one hundred fifty or so k’s per hour.

He approved of that much. The girl could drive.

“What, you mean my place? Well, for one thing, no concealed weapons.” It made it difficult for even a Ninja to approach him, what with the constant surveillance from Mr. and Mrs. Brixton across the way and that gaily-lecherous old crackpot Pillbody over the back fence….and of course there was the well-known Ninja fear, an absolute overriding horror more like it, of being seen naked by Gaijin, (outsiders.)

She gave tight grin and a shake of her head.

“The grounds are beautifully kept, and you can’t even put up a garden shed without going through the Covenant Committee. No mini-bikes, no chainsaws…” No parties, no unnecessary noise after eleven or before six a.m.

Not too many children and half the dogs on Valium. A no brainer, really, which suited him just fine.

She looked over.

“You’re not as dumb as you look. Why, I’ll bet you even like playing volleyball naked and stuff like that, eh?”

He grinned in a feral fashion, causing a little shiver of something to go down her spine.

“You would love the pool.”

She alternately nodded and shook her head as she focused on a clump of traffic up ahead. Her eyes came around again.

“Yeah, I probably would. What do they think of you coming and going all dressed up like anything?”

“Everyone has to have a job. I cut my lawn once in a while and don’t gossip unless they already hate them—or if they’ve already heard it somewhere else.” It made sense, the key to a successful evasion.

She looked over.

“Yeah. I suppose you’re right.” She was quiet for a moment. “I could go for that.”

“Say what?” No!

She drove for a while and then turned again.

“We could barbecue some steaks and do a little swimming, you know, a little sun-bathing.”

Roscoe was sweating now in spite of the air conditioning and his expensive Italian deodorant. He thought very carefully about what he might say. That fair skin had rarely seen the sun and had suffered nothing from the loss. He could imagine its alabaster perfection.

“That would be very nice, young lady.”

Her low, throaty chuckle did nothing to lower his stress levels one iota, for all of this could only mean one thing. Suzie must, in all probability, be his new partner. Gorman had been threatening him with a partner for months, years even, and she was due for retirement very, very soon now.

This might just be the perfect revenge for a lifetime of personal torment.

She couldn’t possibly have meant it seriously.

End