C. Litka's Blog, page 36

7 Years in Self Publishing -- A Report

 

I have been a self-published author for seven years now. In the past dozen years, and without a day job, I have written and published ten novels and two novellas. I write for the fun, so Ido only what I enjoy doing, which is to say writing and producing e and paperbacks. I do hardly anything to promotemy work and nor do I spend any more money than I make from the occasional sales of a book on Amazon. For the last seven years I have let my free price for ebooks do my promotion for me. Since I can produce my books with the help of kindly volunteer beta readers for free, I can give away my books, when possible, without losing money in doing so.

This approach worked well for the first four years or so, but overthe last couple of years, the focus of most dedicatedebook readers hasnarrowed to very specific genresand sub-genres which are served by prolific writers producingthree,four, or more books a year and spend thousands of dollars on advertising them just to stay on these readers’ radar, so vast is the poolof books and authorsthese readers can pick from.

As a result of this gradual shift in the focus of ebook reading, my sales have declined in my traditional venues, which is to say, Smashwords including Apple, Kobo & B & N, and Amazon. Luckily for me, my sales on Google not only grew enough to replace these declines, but made this year, my best yet for both sales numbers, and for my very modest income form books sold on Amazon stores around the world. So let’s take a look at those numbers.

My Sales Numbers

As usual, almost all of the sales are free ebooks sold through Amazon, Smashwords, Apple, and Google. Amazon does sell my books at list price in its non-US stores as well as some of my most recent books in its US store. I don’t bother to separate them out in this report. My books are also available on Kobo, but they do not report free sales to Smashwords. Barnes & Noble does report sales, but they don’t show up on my daily sales charts, so I don’t record those sales by the books – they’re just a rounding error anyway, i.e. you can add 36 books to the total below for 2022) In addition some books are also listed on other sites that offer free books. I don’t know how many, if any, are downloaded from those sites.

Below is the chart comparing sales May 2021 to April 2022 to my year 6 sales.

Book Title / Release Date

Year 6 Sales

Year 7 Sales

Total Sale To date

A Summer in Amber

23 April 2015

598

407

8,223

Some Day Days

9 July 2015

358

371

4,611

The Bright Black Sea

17 Sept 2015

1,320

979

14,795

Castaways of the Lost Star

4 Aug 2016

Withdrawn

Withdrawn

2,176

The Lost Star’s Sea

13 July 2017

986

947

7,916

Beneath the Lanterns

13 Sept 2018

551

754

3,546

Sailing to Redoubt

15 March 2019

728

858

3,190

Prisoner of Cimlye

2 April 2020

632

728

1,605

Lines in the Lawn

8 June 2020

83

30

113

Keiree

18 Sept 2020

853

611

1.194

The Secret of the Tzaritsa Moon

1,110

1.056

2,156

The Secrets of Valsummer House

265

858

1,123

Shadows of an Iron Kingdom*

n/a

1,231

1,231

A Night on Isvalar*

(Amazon only – all $ sales only)

n/a

23 sold

23 plus a

modest # of page views

Total Year Sales

* New releases.

7,484

8,853

50,671

Past Results

Year One, 2015/16: 6,537 (3 novels released)

Year Two, 2016/17: 6,137 (1 novel released)

Year Three, 2017/18: 6,385 (1 novel released)

Year Four, 2018/19: 8,225* (2 novels released) * includes a strange 1950 books sold in one day on Amazon that they say is correct. (6,275 w/o)

Year Five, 2019/20: 8,530 (1 novel released)

Year Six, 2020/21: 7,484 (2 novels released, 1 novella, 1 children's short story)

Year Seven, 2021/22: 8,853 (1 novel, 1 novella)

Past Yearly reports can be found here:

Year 1: https://clitkabooks.blogspot.com/2016/05/a-window-to-self-publishing.html

Year 2: https://clitkabooks.blogspot.com/2017/05/two-years-of-free-books.html

Year 3: https://clitkabooks.blogspot.com/2018/05/3-years-in-self-publishing.html

Year 4: https://clitkabooks.blogspot.com/2019/05/four-years-in-self-publishing.html

Year 5: https://clitkabooks.blogspot.com/2020/05/five-years-in-self-publishing.html

Year 6:https://clitkabooks.blogspot.com/2021/05/six-years-in-self-publishing.html

Sales by Venue

Comparing the sales split between Amazon, Google, and Smashwords (including sales on Apple and B & N) for the last thee years:

Year 5 – 2019/20

Amazon 40%

Smashwords 40%

Google 20%

Year 6 – 2020/29

Amazon 35%

Smashwords 39%

Google 26%

Year 7 – 2021/22

Amazon 21.5%

Smashwords 18%

Google 60.5%

The Takeaway

As you can see from the figures above, Google Play Store accounted for well over half of my sales this past year. Sales on Smashword’s site have declined drastically, so that my more or less stable Apple sales probably account for more than half of my sales reported on Smashwords. Amazon sales have also declined, in part because several of my newer books are not free on Amazon.com, which negatively affect my sales numbers.

The the monthly sales numbers on Google have declined by more than half from their peak. We will have to see if they continue to decline and where they level off. The wild card for Google is that I have just released audiobook versions of all of my books on Google. I have no idea how that will affect sales, if at all.

Looking Forward

In my 6 ½ year report in Nov 2021 I said that I expected to release a new Nine Star Nebula Mystery/Adventure story in February or March, 2022. After that, I hoped to work on a more ambitious project. As it turned out, I shelved the Nine Star story in December and started writing the more ambitious novel in January. I hope to have the first draft of that project, currently entitled EuraEast, completed by early summer, 2022. However, I am planning to shop this story around to agents and traditional publishers for at least six months, and that, only after I complete the final draft have it proofread and reviewed by beta readers. Should I fail to find a publisher for it – the likely outcome – I would probably be releasing it as a self published novel around this time next year. So it could be a full year without a new novel. However, it is possible that once I’ve finished my work on EuraEast, I will return and finish the Nine Star novel releasing it late in 2022 or early in 2023, but that is pure speculation now..

There are, however, several wild cards in all this.

First is. as I have mentioned, that I have released all of my books as audiobooks in the Google Play Store. These are AI narrated books, so that they are not up to the quality of a good, human read book, but I think they might just be good enough – since, unlike commercial works at $20-$30, I’ve released them for free. It may be a little too early to release fiction read by an algorithm, but Google says that it will automatically make improvements to the books as the technology evolves, so that I think it’s worth getting in on the ground floor – especially since this beta program to convert ebooks to audiobooks is currently free. We’ll have to see how they fare. Any feedback is welcome, so if you give them a try, let me know what you think of them.

The next wild card is contests. Last year I entered A Summer in Amberin the Self Published Science Fiction Contest. It did not get out of the initial round, nor was it reviewed at all, so that contest did not generate any appreciable sales. This year I plan to enter Beneath the Lanterns in the Fantasy version of that contest, and Sailing to Redoubt in the science fiction version. We’ll see if either fairs better in those contests and if any sales results can be attributed to them.

And the last wild card is I am considering redoing my paperback books in a slightly smaller form factor using a print on demand service offered by Draft2Digital, a company that has now purchased Smashwords. In addition, I am thinking about of actually spending money promoting these paperback books. I am toying with the idea of offering selected SF bookshops around the country a chance to order, let’s say a $100 worth of my paperback books to sell in their shops at no cost to them, with the option of ordering more at my cost. This is more about creating a modest legacy than making money. I would like some of my novels in paper floating around on the shelves somewhere, long after I’m gone. Still, if I could sell paper books, it would be nice, even if I did it at cost.

So to sum things up, it was a good year, with an interesting year ahead. Stay tuned.

Two Mini Reviews - Children of Earth and Sky & Embers of War

 

Two mini-reviews this week of two books I hopefully downloaded from the library and, alas, did not finish, both for the same reason.

Children of Earth and Sky by Guy Gavriel Kay DNF (9%)

To begin with, this is a fantasy story, which is not my usual forte, I have read good things about Guy Gavriel Kay’s writing, so I decided to give it a try. Kay is indeed a good wordsmith. The story is set in a world similar to the 14th century Mediterranean Sea area, with a focus on an alternative Venice. The story begins with the musings of a new Venetian ambassador to the court of, well, let’s say alternate Constantinople as he waits to be presented to the ruler of this alternate Constantinople. These musings serve to start the world building for the story. From this point of view we slide to a young ship owner of Venice, a want-to-be girl pirate some months later who has her dead grandfather’s spirit some how living in her head. She sets out in a boat ambush a Venetian raiding party that is blockading her city, but before she begins, we cut to a meeting of the ruling body of Venice discussing her success sometime later… This is the first 9% of the story. I don’t like multiple points of view stories to begin with, though no doubt Kay will draw all these threads together at some point. However, I found none of the characters engaging enough to care or continue reading about.

Embers of Warby Gareth L Powell DNF (11%)

Powell is a British science fiction writer of, I gather space operas. At least this story is a space opera. It opens with a prologue of a war where the commander decides to nuke an entire world. We then jump three years forward to the first person narrative of the captain of a crew of 4 who man a sentient ship, one of the warships from the side that nuked the planet that has been decommissioned, and which is now used for search and rescue missions. Their current mission is saving what they can of a space ship’s crew that mysteriously crashed into an ocean. While doing so, one of the team is snatched away by a sea creature. We then skip to the first person point of view of a veteran of that war who is now a famous poet on a space liner that is going to inspect some strange alien artifacts. The space liner comes under attack by forces unknown. And then we are back to the captain on the water planet. As they leave, one crew member short, they are requested to go to the aid of any survivors of that attack on a space liner. With this we switch to the first person view of the sentient ship which, as a warship used to have a crew of 300 people, and who now has a crew of 3. (What with one redshirt getting dragged down to the depths by a tentacled monster.) The ship then tells us a little abut itself, and then how it moves through space… which covers the first 11% of the story. At this point I gave up.

In this case it wasn’t just the multiple points of view, but the, in my opinion, over the top effort of Powell to make this an exciting story. I tend to like understated things, and this story was so pulpish in its frantic effort to create what? Mystery, danger, interest? I don't know, save that it completely turned me off. That and the whole improbability of the premise – a sentient ship with a crew of 4 humans, all of which were off ship standing on a sinking wreck cutting through the hull to get at any survivors in the waterlogged wreck. Really? Not to mention a dedicated rescue space ship that takes days to get to the scene of the wreck. And this is a traditionally published book? Still, I guess this is the stuff readers like. Oh, well.

Balance of Trade by Lee & Miller Review

 

Balance of Trade by Sharon Lee & Steve Miller – C

This is one of 28 novels and many short stories set in their “Liaden Universe.” a collection of novels and short stories that share a common setting. This is the first novel I have read in the collection, and is the fist of three novels featuring the trader Jethri Gobelyn. 

Its premise is that family owned and manned interstellar ships buy and sell goods on their own account and have specialists traders to do so profitably. Jethri is a 17 year old aboard one such ship, learning the trade. After his father’s death, his mother, the ship’s captain has no use for him, and through something of a misadventure he is given the opportunity to become the trader apprentice of a Liaden trader. The Liadens are humans, but who look on the Terrans as more or less barbarians. Jethri must learn the ornate customs of the Liadens to succeed. This was the story I was invested in, and if it was the only focus of the novel, it probably would have ranked as a B grade story.

However, the authors wanted to tell a wider story involving ancient technology, and so even after Jethri leaves the ship, we still have a storyline that follows events on the ship and this ancient super-technology which jumps in and out of the Jethri story – sometimes without any indication of the jump at all! ( Though perhaps that is the fault of the ebook formatting. Who knows?) In any event, I found not only that I didn’t care about that storyline at all, but it became annoying. I soon began to skim and eventually simply ignore it, figuring, correctly, that it would circle back around for the book’s climax. Which it did. The book lost points because of its dual focus, for me.

The second thing that took points away from this story, was the inclusion of human characters with telepathic powers. I found that jarring, out of character with the story’s universe – though it may well  play a role on other stories in this universe. Nevertheless, I felt that it was it out of place, and just too 1950’s 60’s SF-y for my tastes today. It also had little to do with the story in this book, though perhaps it is just setting things up for the next book in the series. 

And lastly, to be honest, the quality of the Jethri story tapered off as his storyline went on. It seemed as if the authors lost interest in his story of adjusting to this new life, as they steered the story back to converge with the second story arc, in what turned out to be a rather lame ending, I thought. Just to take one example, since Jethri lived all his life inside a space ship, he was frightened by the openness of living on a planet, when he had to do so. This is illustrated at the beginning of his stay on a planet, but is never mentioned again. I guess we're to assume that he got used to it quickly. But it was things like this -- big issues that are quickly dropped -- that disappointed me.

The problem with this book for me is, that this would not be how I would’ve written the story. Both as a reader and as a writer I hate multi-points of view, and the two dissimilar storylines did not work for me. Essentially they were two stories folded in together, which I found distracting, and as I said annoying. Lee and Miller can write their story however they want to write it, but I think that they watered down and hurried through the more interesting story to write one that, all in all, seemed rather lame.  Perhaps it was all part of a larger plan and to set up the next two stories in the series. I have my doubts that I will ever find out.

Cover Tease

 

Talk about putting the horse before the cart. Well, I have, after spending several hours this past week working on the cover for my next novel, even though I am just over halfway through writing the first draft of it. I still have months of work ahead before I would ever need any sort of cover. At best. And since I am planning to shop this story around to agents and traditional publishers, the published version of the story will no doubt have a professionally designed cover, assuming I'm successful. (“That’s a joke, son.”) Still, I was thinking about  how I wanted to approach this cover, and came up with some ideas that I simply could not wait to try and see what it would look like.

I do all my own covers, not because I’m good at it, but because I’m cheap. And when you don’t usually charge for your books, cheap is good. Besides, a professionally made cover in the mainstream style isn’t going to change the contents of the book, and so, would probably be misleading, since I don’t write mainstream types of stories.

As I see it, there are several approaches you can take for your covers. You can illustrate an important scene from the story. Or you can back off a bit, and illustrate a non-specific scene to create either a sense of the story, or suggest its mood. Or you can simply toss the story aside and do a cover that you think will sell the book, either with a fictional scene of the fictional story, or using some eye catching graphic design. Being a mostly impressionist painter, I generally  have striven to create a cover that suggests the mood of the story with a scene as close to an actual scene in the book as I can, that being the limit of my talent.

This time around, I decided to avoid painting a cover altogether – as that has gotten to be quite a chore for me these days – and instead make a cover that gives a sense of the book by using a sort of collage effect on the cover. More  of a graphic approach to the cover this time around. This effort involved using a 1913 copy of A Satchel Guide For the Vacation Tourist in Europe, (with its red cover changed to blue) from my bookshelves, along with its included rail map of Central Europe, a photo of a ship's anti-aircraft gun that I took when, at the age of 9, I got to go aboard a cruiser off the coast of Milwaukee as part of some sort of naval showcase event, a photo of my late father-in-law at the age of 31, along with a detail from a photo I found of a family photo of a Russian aristocratic family in the 19thcentury that I came across in researching my story. I then used these in creating several items for the collage in Gimp – ID cards and a newspaper clipping. The result is below.

Of course everything about this cover is tentative, including the name of the novel. Basically it is a proof of concept. All the items in the composition are on separate layers so that they can be shifted around as I please at a later date. But in any event, now you know what the story is all about, right?

Looking Back & Forward

 

The 27th of April 2022 will mark the end of my seventh year in self-publishing. I will, as usual, be reporting how my publishing efforts fared during the past year and post the sales numbers for the year and lifetime figures early in May. I usually speculate on what the next year will bring in that post as well. While I may do that as well, I’ve already been already thinking about my future adventures in self publishing, and I thought I might share some of my thoughts early.

The truth is that I’m feeling a bit restless when it comes to self publishing. I set out to see if I could find a readership for my work -- without putting either my money or much effort into doing so. I opted to rely on the frictionless nature of “free” to tempt potential readers into giving my work a try. I’m thinking that seven years is a sufficient amount of time to judge how well my plan worked, or didn’t.

I have reached a fair number of readers, though I can’t put any solid number to it. My best selling work has been downloaded over 14,000 times. But most other titles sales numbers run in the 4,000 to 1,000 range, Clearly a only few thousand people at most read all of my books. But that is fair enough, since I try to make each book different so as to perhaps appeal to different people. Given my very modest efforts at promoting my work, I am quite happy with the number of people I have entertained. It is a good number, but not so many that I’m feeling any pressure to produce more work. Though I am. The big upside, as far as I am concerned, is that I did it my way. And though I could’ve afforded to spend money promoting my work, I am convinced that it would not have made much of a difference, since I am not writing mainstream Amazon ebooks. So in that respect I am not only happy, and richer as well.

While I think my approach worked initially, but as time has gone by, it no longer works all that well, due to the way the ebook market has evolved over these last seven years. The free price that brought me several thousand readers does not work as well as it once did on Amazon because no one is likely find non-promoted books on that site. Not spending a dime to promote my work will not work today for the same reason. And if I really want lots of readers, not only would I have to spend folding money to promote them, but I would have to write the type of books that most Amazon ebook readers want to read in their genre. So, what can I do?

The first thing I am going to do differently, is to shop around my next novel around to agents and publishers instead of self publishing it out of the gate. I expect to allocate six months after I finish it for this project. If, by ill chance, it should not happen to sell, then… Well, then I don’t know. I might look into launching it on kickstarter. I hear you can make millions doing that. Or I could self publish it, though this time, with little to lose, I am leaning towards putting a price on it right from the start. However if I went this route, I would still offer a limited number of free ARC (advanced readers’ copies) to my loyal fans via this blog site. But that is likely a year in the future, so nothing is set in stone.

I’m also thinking of trying to get my paper books into select SF bookshops, perhaps with a free $100 worth of books to prime the pump, and selling additional copies at my printing cost afterwards. There are a lot of SF stores that I could approach with this offer. However, I will wait until the Draft2Digital merger is complete and use their print on demand service, rather than Amazon's, for this project, should I decide to go down this road.

As I said, I’m restless. I’m willing to explore new options. That said, being an old dog, learning new tricks might prove to be either too hard, or too much trouble. So who knows? I don’t expect anything to change anytime too soon. But things might change someday.

The 27th of April 2022 will mark the end of my seventh y...

 

The 27th of April 2022 will mark the end of my seventh year in self-publishing. I will, as usual, be reporting how my publishing efforts fared during the past year and post the sales numbers for the year and lifetime figures early in May. I usually speculate on what the next year will bring in that post as well. While I may do that as well, I’ve already been already thinking about my future adventures in self publishing, and I thought I might share some of my thoughts early.

The truth is that I’m feeling a bit restless when it comes to self publishing. I set out to see if I could find a readership for my work -- without putting either my money or much effort into doing so. I opted to rely on the frictionless nature of “free” to tempt potential readers into giving my work a try. I’m thinking that seven years is a sufficient amount of time to judge how well my plan worked, or didn’t.

I have reached a fair number of readers, though I can’t put any solid number to it. My best selling work has been downloaded over 14,000 times. But most other titles sales numbers run in the 4,000 to 1,000 range, Clearly a only few thousand people at most read all of my books. But that is fair enough, since I try to make each book different so as to perhaps appeal to different people. Given my very modest efforts at promoting my work, I am quite happy with the number of people I have entertained. It is a good number, but not so many that I’m feeling any pressure to produce more work. Though I am. The big upside, as far as I am concerned, is that I did it my way. And though I could’ve afforded to spend money promoting my work, I am convinced that it would not have made much of a difference, since I am not writing mainstream Amazon ebooks. So in that respect I am not only happy, and richer as well.

While I think my approach worked initially, but as time has gone by, it no longer works all that well, due to the way the ebook market has evolved over these last seven years. The free price that brought me several thousand readers does not work as well as it once did on Amazon because no one is likely find non-promoted books on that site. Not spending a dime to promote my work will not work today for the same reason. And if I really want lots of readers, not only would I have to spend folding money to promote them, but I would have to write the type of books that most Amazon ebook readers want to read in their genre. So, what can I do?

The first thing I am going to do differently, is to shop around my next novel around to agents and publishers instead of self publishing it out of the gate. I expect to allocate six months after I finish it for this project. If, by ill chance, it should not happen to sell, then… Well, then I don’t know. I might look into launching it on kickstarter. I hear you can make millions doing that. Or I could self publish it, though this time, with little to lose, I am leaning towards putting a price on it right from the start. However if I went this route, I would still offer a limited number of free ARC (advanced readers’ copies) to my loyal fans via this blog site. But that is likely a year in the future, so nothing is set in stone.

I’m also thinking of trying to get my paper books into select SF bookshops, perhaps with a free $100 worth of books to prime the pump, and selling additional copies at my printing cost afterwards. There are a lot of SF stores that I could approach with this offer. However, I will wait until the Draft2Digital merger is complete and use their print on demand service, rather than Amazon's, for this project, should I decide to go down this road.

As I said, I’m restless. I’m willing to explore new options. That said, being an old dog, learning new tricks might prove to be either too hard, or too much trouble. So who knows? I don’t expect anything to change anytime too soon. But things might change someday.

Old Habits

 

Old habits die hard. For the past six months or more I’ve been enjoying watching several different science fiction booktube channels on You Tube. My three favorite are:

Media Death Cult

Book Odyssey

Outlaw Bookseller 

However, the fact is that not only have I not read almost all of the books that they discuss and review, I don’t I have any desire to do so, even after watching their glowing reviews. Oh, I’ve sampled some of the authors and books, but haven’t liked any of them. This should be clear if you’ve read any of my mini-reviews of the books I’ve attempted to read over the last six months. In short, I’m not telling you anything here that you don’t already know.

This fascination with science fiction, without actually liking it all that much, is not a new phenomena. Way back in 2018 I wrote that I no longer considered myself a card carrying science fiction fan. You can read the post here. Back then I was just reading some websites rather than watching booktubers on YouTube.

So what keeps me watching these booktubers and reading SF sites? As I said at the start, old habits – the habits of a lifetime – die hard. As much as I have fond memories of the SF of my youth, these days it mostly disappoints me. And yet, I still enjoy learning about the SF books that I personally have no actual interest in reading. The way I look at it, watching or reading reviews of SF books saves me the trouble of reading them, while at the same time, I painlessly, and often entertainingly, learn something about them and their authors.

I had intended to say a lot more about why I don’t like most science fiction – both the modern stuff and all the classics that I missed from the 1970’s onward. But, on reflection, why bother? It is just a matter of personal taste, which applies only to me. So I’ll save your from another old man yelling at the clouds. There are many ways and many reasons to write a story, and just as many ways and reasons to enjoy reading a story. All have value. This flexibility is what makes reading so appealing – to those of us who still read. These YouTube booktubers, and the authortubers whose videos I watch as well, are all celebrating reading. More power to them.

Remembering Frank

My father-in-law, Frank Kanaskie, died a week ago, of a heart attack, on 19 March 2022 at the age of 94. He was one of the good ones – one of those “luckiest people in the world people;” a person who needed people. He made and kept many friends all throughout his long life. For example, he was the grocery manager of a butcher shop, and had teen age stock boys working part time under him. Many of those stock boys remained lifelong friends of his. Though he loved life – he often mentioned his sadness that all his lifelong buddies had proceeded him in death. His stage 5 kidney failure meant that he could not eat his favorite foods, and a very painful bad back meant that he could not walk without pain, and not much further than a couple hundred feet, even with a walker. His short term memory was going as well, so conversations with him could be pretty circular. None of these aliments prevented him from taking his scooter down to play sheepshead with the other card playing residence of the senior housing facility where he and his wife of 50 years, Trudy, lived. In short, if I in his position, I would be wondering were death’s sweet sting was, he was still in love with life.

His first wife, and mother of his four children, Jean, died of cancer when my wife was only 10 years old, and she was the oldest. Left with four young children to raise, he was lucky that his mother, “Granny” was also a people person who welcomed him and his children back home. His stepfather at least tolerated them – they served as this remote control for the TV in the evening. Still, if I was in that position… well, I give him credit as well. Frank and Granny raised them until he was introduced to Trudy ten years later – proposing to her on their first date and marrying her three months later. He was an impatient man, a man who wanted things done, ideally, right now.

I am sure that he would be diagnosed today with ADHA. He was always on the go, especially in his early years. My wife as some notes she took on their annual vacation with him when she was 12 years old. On the second day he woke the kids, telling them that it was 7:00 am. They later found out it was actually 5:00 am, but he was up as was the sun, so why waste the day in bed? And on vacation, it was one activity after another – no rest for the wicked. He never liked silence or just sitting around doing nothing, though as he aged into his 50’s, he came to enjoy reading. And though he never finished college, he loved to learn new things all his life.

He could play a variety of musical instruments by ear, but with ADHA he never had the patience to spend the hours of practice needed to become a musician. He envied handymen and artists and tried his hand those arts as well, but again, lacked the patience -- he judged his efforts against the work of decades and found his work too disappointing to continue. However, his great talent was as a people person, and he was great at that.

Another of his talents was the laying "guilt trips" on his daughters, though he called it “salesmanship.” He was a master salesman and for all his life, his wish was their command.

His greatest passion was golf. He was good at it, and played the game well into his 80’s, though I think his back was bothering him long before that. When he retired and could play golf whenever he wanted to, he still only played twice a week, which, in retrospect, I think is telling. His next greatest passion was sheepshead, and he could play that, and win money at it, until the very end of his life.

He was also one of those great fun-loving Grandpas, a favorite of all his grand and great grand children, and will be deeply missed by them. He was a dear friend of mine. He was always enthusiastic and supportive of my various ventures, be it selling tea mail order, painting, or writing books. In recent years he always asked about how my writing was coming, and read and enjoyed my books. We enjoyed talking religion even though we never agreed. Age, distance and covid reduced our contact to a few brief visits and telephone conversations over the last few years, Given the pain and reduced state he lived it, I can’t help but see his passing as a blessing. Though I know he would disagree with me on that too, even though he said he was ready. Still, death is the price we all must pay for life, and at 94, no one can kick about the price of a lifetime like his. While I know that I won’t ever see him again, he remains in my inner world right where he has always been – a great guy, a great friend and a great sheepshead player. Death doesn't change that.

Riding the (Virtual) Rails: Slovakia

 

photo credit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAV6T...

Slovakia was the first former Easter Block country I visited virtually. I spent several months traveling the rail system of Slovakia, the southern half of the former Czechoslovakia. I found the differences between Slovakia and, say, France or Germany, quite stark. To begin with, Slovakia is a noticeably less prosperous country than the western countries I traveled through. The towns and cities, the sliver of which one can see from the cab of a train, I thought looked rather nondescript. Which is to say neither ancient or modern, seemingly no national architectural style. The stations do not seem to have large parking lots – the people leaving the train just followed a walkway or a dirt path into town. 

photo credit https://www.youtube.come/watch?v=5yHhHeY-Y7Q

This was the first country I traveled in that had “halts” along the branch lines – basically some concrete blocks alongside the rails to form a low embankment where the passengers would embark. They might have a three sided shelter, think of bus stops in the middle of the countryside, with any town that they were serving completely out of sight. This is another country where the station masters are out of their offices to see every train go by, and where, on the branch lines, there are those huts on either side of the station where the tracks converge and must be switched manually. All the main lines are electrified, though some of the branch lines run diesel engines and can be very twisty. Some of the trains just creep along, so here's a pro tip: you can speed up the train by viewing the video at up to 2X speed, a setting in the on screen setting icon. It helps on some of the very boring routes, if you happened to be a completest like myself.

photo credit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcmPk...

I don’t wish to be too harsh on Slovakia. It is a beautiful country, indeed all of Easter Europe seems to be. I don’t know how the political situation and tourist accommodations fare in these countries, but these countries are certainly worth visiting. One of the great things about Slovakia via Youtube trains is that you can travel on just about every route. See map below. The routes in yellow are the routes available from this Youtuber: SlovakiaVovlaku.sk: https://www.youtube.com/c/Vovlakusk/videos

 

All of the routes are identified with a number, which is the train route number. Using the map below, you can identify what routes you might want to take. It is a whole lot easier than looking up every city on Google Maps. (If you can read the numbers, that is. This is the best that I can do.

In your travels around Slovakia you will catch glimpses of ancient castles on the hills, and deer running across the tracks. There is a train that takes you up to a sky resort in winter. And it has plenty of hills, and farmland to travel through. As always, if you want to pick and choose the most scenic rides, consult a topographical map to see where the mountains are, and take a trip through them.
photo credit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAV6T...

Mini-Review Too Much Like Lightning

 

Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer – DNF

This one is on me. I’m sure it is a very creative and creatively written story – the first volume of a four book series – but its narrative style was just too ornate and disjointed for me to get into. Sometimes it was in first person, and other times it seemed like the first person narrator stepped back and was relating incidents of the story that they weren’t present in third person. The first 10% or so that I read suggested that the books offered lots of original concepts, indeed, too many for this old man. You would have to put more effort into reading this book than I cared to put into it. As I said, that’s on me. I read light entertaining books for light entertainment. Deep philosophical musings don’t interest me. Dark and horror stories don’t interest me. And I really don’t like being lost in a story -- wondering what the hell is going on -- which I was, more or less, in this one. Oh, I got the basics of the plot – some sort of machine --  a transporter --  is in the hands of the wrong people, and our narrator is tasked with finding it and getting it back. What that has to do with toy soldiers that come alive was not clear in the first 10%,  But I guess I didn’t care enough about either that or the narrator, and their ornate style of narrating the story to push on. It was just too much work.