Fortune's Least Favorites

The Mega-millions jackpot went up to over $640,000,000 this last week, sending the nation into a flurry of greed and hope. For that kind of money a lot of dreams could come true. Not the ordinary dreams about buying a home and family, those dreams that most families can attain in a dozen generations of work. Like buying a tropical island paradise and a fleet of F-16 fighter jets to defend it. The winner(s) of this drawing would be very wealthy, and all over night. Their wold would change and perhaps not all for the better. I suppose that this depends on the person in question and their ability to handle this huge overnight change.

One Hundred and Seventy Five Million to One. Those are the odds against any individual intent on taking the Mega-millions lottery jackpot. One Hundred and Seventy Five Million possible combinations of winning numbers. Only a fool would game in those odds. I brought it up so as you might expect, I am a fool who gamed with those odds. Every now and again I like to drop a dollar on a ticket. As a driver, every night I pass at least one billboard. Fuck the State for that reminder. That billboard keeps the notion alive – which is exactly what it is meant to do. Think of how many hundreds of millions of tickets had to sell for the purse to grow so large.

The process of the drawing is simple. The player pays $1 for a ticket with 6 numbers. The first 5 of those numbers are drawn from one pool of numbered balls ranging from 1-56. The final slot is drawn from a second set ranged 1-46. The more numbers you match on your ticket, the larger the pay-out. They say that the over all odds of winning on a given ticket are 1 in 40.

there is no skill involved ion this game, just reliance on the nebulous concept of luck. Luck is a funny thing that I'm not sure I fully understand what it all entails. It seems to be applied to the regular happenings of the world in addition to the combination of choices that you have made, as they interact with the decisions and actions of the people around you. Your decisions toss you out into the world and and the stream that is Luck, and maybe you'll find gold or be flung over a waterfall. The future lies unseen around the bend, and who knows what rocks have been tossed into your path.

What a Quantum way of looking at things. I have no doubt why people cling on a belief in a friendly Deity guiding their steps. After all, who but an utter maniac would willingly leave their house when they have so little control over their lives? This develops a sense of Fate I think, and lends itself quite well to taking extraordinary chances. After all, if God wills it, you may just win. Those odds are for other people. A small part of the back of my mind has that thought stuck on repeat, maybe I'm fated to win the big one!

But playing amuses me. I'm aware of the odds, vaguely, and thinking about such usually makes be break out in laughter as I recall the silly thing that I just did. I doubt I fully understand the full extent of the meaning of these numbers, my simple monkey brain isn't wired to grasp such concepts. But I know what the near edge of impossible is – and lotto odds are as close as one can get. Still, one in one hundred and seventy five million is far better than zero. There is still a chance and all the chance requires is for me to relinquish a single slim dollar.

That IF stands up tall and shouts loud to a lot of people. An inexpensive IF with a high payout against those long odds. What is a dollar, or even five or ten, against say quitting my job and buying a yacht and crewing it with gorgeous young women to sail the seas? These are pleasant enough daydreams, and they lead to why I play the lotto in the first place. I like to daydream about what I would do with the money. Help the family, invest in some causes and finally disappear over the horizon on my pleasure boat.

175,000,000 to 1. I know that I'm not going to win. It is a fine bit of magical thinking on the part of adults to believe that they will ever win. Even if you drop a c-note, your odds are still negligible. The employees of the company for whom I work for put together a pool. Kick in $5 and you get a share of the L00T should one of the tickets happen to hit. We're a small company, and the boss bought in as well. There were jokes that if we won the jackpot, the company's doors would be closed on monday. Mostly I laughed up my sleeve at the idea while day-dreaming about what I'd do with my winnings.

The pool lead to those interesting conversations about what we would do with the money. Sometimes people are willing to share their dreams when discussing hypotheticals, and you learn quite about about the people around you as they shed that light on how their minds work and what drives them. I don't think I'll discuss my own plans, beyond the fact that I would pay off my student loans.

In the end, somebody wins. Somebody has to win. And if somebody is going to win, then why not me? Hope is a funny thing like that. But for now, I need to go and cancel my Yacht order. Of the $90 we collectively put up, we got $5 back.

In the mean time, I'll be back in that place between Hope and Reality that I inhabit. Until that jackpot soars again.

Hack Novelry part 2 Errata – an addition to yesterday's winding path of whining.

So, I explored different avenues with getting my work published. Here, I had something that I made, a world that I slaved over and lived in for months at a time, and it was just sitting on my harddrive collecting sub-atomic dust. One day it occurred to me to see whether or not I could upload it to Amazon for the Kindle as an independent. The answer was yes. They required a steep 65% cut of the profit at the time.

E-Publishing of course has its pros and cons. Like about everything else on the planet. I like the phrase 'double-edged sword'. It cuts both ways. The positives and negatives are also heavily intermeshed, with reasons showing up on both sides of the list, depending on how one looks at these things.

Pro: No middlemen, you go directly to the public, there are no publishers or agents, thus you get a larger share of the profits. That seems to be me the highest Libertarian ideal of the free market in action – though I'm not a Libertarian. No editors, your story stays exactly as you envisioned it.

Con: No editing, no assistance with cleaning up your prose, and you only have one set of eyes (unless you have a horde of willing friends – most of my friends are busy, uninterested, or both), to catch mistakes and help add that layer of polish. Lack of resources or expertise – you're forced to market it yourself. Lack of reach, no inexpensive print books(I prefer print to electronic). There isn't anyone out there actively working to pimp or improve your story. You're alone in the world to fend for yourself. I find myself needing feedback, a seperate set of eyes. It is difficult to envelop the entire story in my mind. I cannot see the forest for the trees as they say.

Woohoo I just brought out another tired old adage!

There are, out there in the vast wilds of the internet, services that will create a physical copy of your book. I've tried it – and sold somewhere around 3 copies(I have a feeling that at least one of those was a friend of mine). I don't blame people for not being interested, the first version had a lot of formatting issues and I'm the sole editor, so you can safely bet that there were mistakes aplenty. In fact, I've myself purchased nearly as many copies(2) as proofs.

As it is, I am a one man show. I create my own blurbs – which I mentioned I lack skill in doing. I've slathered together my cover art, some of which I am proud of visually, though I'd rather a real graphic artist uses their skills.

I started out and my sales tactic was to upload and wait. In the mean time I'd Calculate how many sales I will need to quit my shitty job and take up the gauntlet full time. The mathematical principal worked out to the answer “Way more than you're getting fool!”

The independent ebook author's dream seems to involve a deep hope that eventually someone will find your work, and then rave about it on their blog – prompting others to buy and rave. A word of mouth campaign. I'm just waiting for the likes of Simon Pegg or Penny Arcade to magically show up out of the chaos. So far, the wait has been long, and I honestly don't expect it to ever end. Magical Thinking and all that.

Really, if wishing and Magical Thinking worked, I would be a billionaire Ninja-Wizard who lived in my underground compound with a cadre of brilliant and beautiful geek women of all different flavors. The so-called author of “The Secret” can cram it into all of their various orifices. And then pack it in with a chainsaw.

Really though, how does an independent get the word out? I want to be fair and honest, no hype or bullshit. I hate, HATE, advertising. I also hate approaching strangers and just talking about my work. How is the blog different? You're coming to me if at all. Once again, I'm just tossing this up in my little point on the web. I like to think of it as a recording of me talking to myself.

Amazon has offered a service where one can give their books away free. Wooh? Well, if it gets you some buzz, why not?

But once again, how do I go about capturing an audience to spin my tales? I've been told that the stories are great. The characters are interesting and enjoyable. Sure, all of that was from my mom, but a mother must be Objective when talking about her kids prospects right? Pfah. Actually, after a year of complaining that she didn't get a copy of zombie 1, and receiving one, the Mom still hasn't gotten around to reading it(she doesn't like zombies). - all relevant compliments have come from outside of my circle.

The high point of December was receiving a letter from a fan wondering if there was going to be a zombie 5. How simple it is to raise hopes and spirits. A few positive words from a stranger is all it takes. Yes, I have plans for zombie 5, but other stories have gotten in the way. Especially after my hopes flagged over the first four books not going anywhere.

I just need to keep pushing onward. To find the energy to finish the projects I'm working on. The time to write the ideas that I have bumping around in my head. This is slow going.

I'm a driver, I'm a winner. Again.

I cannot say for sure if the Universe loves me or hates me. I think that my being inspires some sort of twisted passive aggressive love-hate mania in whatever cosmic force that drives reality. Last march, my job disappeared and I found myself rather suddenly unemployed. This happened about a month after I first bought into the brand new Health Insurance plan. I was insured for a whole month!

There was of course the downside of things. No income. I did happen to receive unemployment benefits for a few weeks. I live in Michigan and the economy here has been in the hole for as long as I've been alive. I actually was employed on the strength of my sister's performance. She's intelligent and hard working and they decided to hire me as well. I'm a bit dimmer but driven to keep busy, and I took on every task that was thrown my way. I've written about the experience previously.

But they were re-organizing and my position disappeared. So it goes. The only thing that burned me was that the company kept a sleazy, unreliable... I have more

I took the time to read and write and work on other projects. I revised novels 5 and 6 and then wrote and revised novel 7, along with a double-handful of short stories. There were also loads of books and regular exercise. I re-discovered the joys of the local library. I built up my post apocalyptic survival library. All while looking for work elsewhere in the country. It felt great to be productive again. I was living on natural time, life was mostly good, if a bit uncertain.

My co-worker calls this delightful state of being “Pretirement” as she postulates that we'll never actually be able to retire so we might as well take advantage of our brief periods of unemployment whilst we're young. I do not disagree with this supposition, though I'm optimistic that one day I'll at least be able to get my writing career going to the point where I can support myself doing something I love. Still, I embrace my unemployment with glee, even as I try to avoid it.

Sometimes it feels as if the universe is giving me a taste of what life could be like. Like an extremely subtle demonic temptation. Sell your meager soul and live the dream of the hack novelist!

So we come back to the original statement in this post. I was offered a job as a driver full time running a route that I had occasionally covered during my last stint in their service. They hired me back. More pay. Different hours. No data-entry. I get to drive a car with a manual transmission – another topic previously hit upon, a skill that I picked up while working for this company.

Sweet! How fortunate!

I mean, I've already got some fun anecdotes. One dude in a wheelchair said that he loves me. I thanked him for that. I mean, there are other sources(beautiful women) whom I'd rather hear that declaration from - who hearing utter it might make my decade. But you take it where you can get it, so I thanked him and moved on.

But here we go. I do live in the state of Michigan. The weather is cold and we tend to get a lot of precipitation due to the fact that we're surrounded by lakes. In the winter we see this in the form of snow, sleet and freezing rain. I've come to realize a new functioning law in the universe. If I'm driving and there is a chance that it will snow or rain that night, it will snow or rain that night. Of the less than 10 days that I've been working, the weather conditions have been adverse for at least 80% of the time. But, Michigan, winter. Blah blah blah. This is all expected. A given. A fact of life to be complained about despite all the rest.

There were a couple incidents last night that really made me wonder if I offended creation by turning down some pact that I was just unaware of.

So far in Driving I've nearly been creamed by a cop car and have had a couple other close encounters to brag about. Part of the risk of driving at night. But yesterday, the universe re-introduced the ever looming threat of Deer to be the bane of my existence.

Deer. Louis CK is quite explicit about his feelings for them – and I feel that he has some valid points.

Last night, after leaving my third stop, I came across a herd of five does(a deer, a female deer) off to the side of the road. They were blocked by a tall fence that hemmed them out of some person's property and they see my car flying down the road in their general direction. As usual, they decided to break and run, right in front of my car, at the last second. - this is after long hesitation that allows me to come closer and closer. The company car that I drive is a Chevy Aveo. A Kleenex box on wheels. I don't need deer to throw themselves at me and crumple my ride. I missed the dumbest member of the herd by about three feet as it waited until the very last second to run across my path.

Luckily, I saw them early and was able to slow down. Fucking stupid deer. We need to breed wolves that can only digest white-tail deer flesh and set them loose on the herd.

Now for the figurative deer encounter. Same night maybe 4 hours later. My run was over and I had punched out and was driving home for the night while I was driving along in my own sweet ride – a white 96 Chevy Lumina that is somehow still able to start and drive, though a growing percentage of mass is represented by Iron Oxide. It's a round-town car, as it tends to vibrate uncomfortably whenever is passes the threshold of 60mph. I call it the Drift, and it gets mention in my Pharmacy novel.

Back to deer encounter 2. I was rolling along homebound on one of the main streets around 11pm and thinking about climbing into bed and going to sleep. Suddenly a car darted out of the cross street right in front of me. And then the driver stopped dead and froze, creating an impromptu roadblock and an excellent implement for an action movie chase scene.

Luckily my breaks still work, which surprises me, or I'm sure that Drift would have dissolved and burst into a ball of fire.

The silver lining? I wouldn't have to worry about paying my student loans back. Well, back to another evening of living dangerously.