Michael R. Hicks's Blog, page 2

Social Media Update

I don’t want to turn this into a long-winded gab about social media, so I’ll first cut to the chase: for anyone who’s followed me on Facebook, X/Twitter, or BlueSky to this point, my new virtual author hangout – aside from here on my web site, of course – will be on BlueSky as @authormichaelhicks.bsky.social.

For a variety of reasons, I’ve already deactivated my account on X and will soon be deactivating my accounts on all Meta platforms (mainly Facebook and Instagram for me), as well. I’ll also be deactivating my original account on BlueSky.

So, I hope you’ll join me on BlueSky, but you can of course always hit me up via email and add comments on posts here on the web site. Also, sign up for my newsletter (I don’t send out a bunch) so you’ll be sure to get a heads-up on future releases, sales, etc.!

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Low-Level Chronic Fear

When my wife and I visited France over the summer (2024) to figure out if we wanted to live there, something very interesting happened about a week into our six-week trip: both of us, to the day, felt as if a sense of tension, of unease, had faded away. My wife explained that this sensation was low-level chronic fear.

Low-level chronic fear or anxiety, which in clinical terms may also be referred to as general anxiety disorder (GAD), can be described according to this definition:

Low-level anxiety is characterised by a constant sense of dread or unease. It’s an underlying, daily tension, which can make daily life feel really challenging. Common symptoms of low-level anxiety include: Excessive worrying and overthinking.

The funny thing is that we never knew we were suffering from it until we experienced its absence. And that’s exactly what happened to us about a week into our trip: that underlying tension, like a background hum or vibration, slipped away, and it felt wonderful. It was gone, like a weight from around our necks, until we returned to the U.S.

As I said, this sensation isn’t something you might even notice until you’ve experienced its absence. To do that, however, you have to find a place where you’re really at peace, where both your conscious and subconscious minds no longer feel constantly under siege.

It’s not hard to imagine why we’re subject to low-level chronic fear here in the States. Here are just a few things we came up with that are no doubt contributors to this anxiety, not in any particular order:

You or your children getting shotLosing your jobHealth insurance, from not having any to going insane trying to get coverage for needed careGetting sick or, far worse, becoming disabledThe flip side of the above: trying to stay healthy while everyone else is trying to get you sickNot having enough money to cover rent, food, and other billsBeing able to retire, or having to come out of retirement because you can’t live on your fixed incomeNo support to care for yourself, your children, parents, or other familyNot having any paid leavePolicePolitics (waves hands at everything)Global issues like climate change, pollution, the pandemic, etc.

In short, most Americans have a lengthy laundry list of unpleasant “what ifs” and a very small safety margin between staying afloat and drowning. Millions of us are little more than a few hundred dollars between surviving and joining the record number of our unhoused fellow citizens, and we have very few social safety nets.

When we were in France, even as visitors, that tension evaporated. I’ll say again, it’s impossible to know how good that feels until you’ve experienced it.

But why? Why did we feel that way in France (and I suspect we would’ve experienced the same in many other countries)?

Go back and look at that list, above. Granted, a lot of things on that list didn’t apply to us as visitors (e.g., things related to work, retirement, etc.). But we didn’t have to worry about getting shot. The price of most food there is half what it is here if you shopped at Walmart, and far better quality. We knew that if we required medical care, the first priority would be treating us, not making sure we could pay outrageous bills; and whatever we did have to pay (which would be reimbursed by our U.S. insurance in this case) would be a fraction of what it would be here. Yes, France has poor people – every country does – and I’m sure there are more than a few who are homeless. But we didn’t see any in our travels, whereas in the U.S. we’ve seen a LOT. The police aren’t an overwhelming presence; in fact, outside of the major cities they’re pretty scarce unless you call for them. And for those who do live there (versus visitors like ourselves), there are social safety nets to help people and families, and things like quality elder care – which is a nightmare here in the U.S. – are an integral party of their overall healthcare system.

The irony is that this is how it is in most other countries outside the developing world, and even many of those countries have universal health care, better food, lower cost of living, and don’t have a gun epidemic. But the wealthiest nation in history – the United States of America – doesn’t have those things, and I fear never will.

As my wife and I anticipated, that low-level chronic fear returned very quickly after we got back to the U.S. You can feel it like a low-voltage charge running through you, keeping your entire body tensed up just a bit, constantly. Once you learn to recognize it, it’s a very, very unpleasant sensation, and I can’t wait to be free of it again. Hopefully permanently.

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The Beauty of France: Our Impressions So Far

While France checked all our major boxes for a place to live, our decision to move there was determined by other factors, as well. One of the biggest is just how beautiful the country is. You can barely turn around without bumping into a beautiful little town or village, and in between them the country is an amazing quilt of agriculture, forests, mountains, and rivers. And of course, if you want the big city life, there’s Paris, Marseilles, Lyon, and the other metro areas.

During our six week recon trip over the summer of 2024, after taking the TGV train (hey, high speed rail!) from Paris to Rennes, which was our jumping off point to explore Brittany, Normandy, and the upper Loire Valley, I figure we drove somewhere between 1500 and 2000 km in our rental car through a few dozen towns and villages. While some were certainly more charming than others, none of them were the sad, run-down affairs that you’re almost certain to encounter in many places in the U.S. (and we’ve been through around 40 states in the last 2-3 years). Maybe there are such places in France, but we certainly didn’t see any.

In short, what we saw during that trip (again, focusing on Brittany, Normandy, and the upper Loire Valley, which were the regions we’d chosen as potential landing zones for living there) reinforced our research about France and also underscored why we wanted a base or home in Europe. There’s simply an endless parade of amazingly beautiful things to see in France and across Europe, all of which is easily accessible by rail, and we hadn’t even scratched the surface.

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Here are a few other general impressions, which again are limited to those places we actually saw, but I believe likely pertain to the rest of the country:

There’s very, very little garbage lying around like there is in so many places here, or tons of junk in people’s yards, etc. The French have a great deal of civic pride in their towns and their homes and it shows.We saw very, VERY few police. If I recall correctly, I think during the entire six weeks we were there – outside of Paris, where there are a lot of police to provide security to the major tourist attractions – I think we only saw maybe two or three police vehicles. That really shocked me, in a good way. While there’s no shortage of cars, to be sure, vehicles don’t rule the roost like they do in the U.S. French roads are as big as they have to be, and no bigger; they don’t put any more of their land under asphalt and concrete than absolutely necessary. Country roads are as wide as a big tractor, and you need to learn how to get out of the way. Roads in many of the towns can get tight. And with very few exceptions that we saw, the roads are generally kept in good repair.As a follow on to the above about cars, there are many places in France where you simply don’t need a car (we won’t be buying one there). Their public transit system is excellent, although it gets thin out in the country. You can rent a car from the typical auto rental companies, but many markets of their two major grocery chains – LeClerc and Super U – rent cars for 10 to 20 euros/day plus mileage if you need some wheels. There’s also Uber and taxis. “The French are rude” schtick is a crock. I suspect that came about when rude Ugly Americans were, justifiably, treated with contempt when acting like arrogant jackasses. I’d been to Paris a few times before, back in the 90s, and never once had someone be rude, and that experience was repeated during our summer trip. All the French people we met, from folks just walking by on the street to servers at restaurants, etc., were friendly and polite. Our French hosts also weren’t put off by our nascent understanding of the language: we always managed to communicate, even with those who spoke no English, and we never encountered any condescension, eye-rolling, etc. Flowers. The French LOVE flowers. They plant them everywhere and keep the plants well-tended. It’s hard to describe just how much the flowers add to the beauty of homes, towns, and landscapes.

I could probably go on with quite a few more observations, but I think you get the idea. Again, if you’re considering the expat life, France may not be for you, either because something about it turns you off or you’re interested in other parts of the world. These posts are mainly just to help give you some food for thought in contemplating your own decision.

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We’re Moving To France!

Yes, we’re moving to France. As in permanently, although we’ll be visiting the U.S. once a year for the foreseeable future to touch base with family and attend a business event. But as of April 2025, we’ll officially be American expats in France. So how did we come to be here?

This process actually started several years ago, when we began kicking around the idea of leaving ‘Murica for another land. Why? For us the desire to exit stage left boiled down to these major factors (not necessarily in particular order):

Affordable real estateUniversal and good quality healthcareClimate-consciousPublic transportationLower cost of livingHealthier foodBetter quality of lifeNo gun cultureAffordable, high-quality education

Note for my COVID-conscious friends: I didn’t put pandemic awareness on my list because pretty much every country has “moved on,” and my assumption is that we’ll have to continue to protect ourselves anywhere else just as we do in the U.S. However, some countries are better about masking and other mitigations than others, for example. So you’ll have to research that aspect.

I did a lot of research on a LOT of different countries, and after narrowing things down and adding some more factors to our personal list (e.g., easy access to Europe), France wound up checking the most boxes for us.

I want to be clear up-front: if you’re looking at moving abroad, or even just contemplating the possibility, where you want to go is a very personal decision. There are quite a few countries that check every single box in my list, above. Beyond those sorts of things, you have to decide what other factors are important to you and how heavily each one weighs in the mix.

Also, we weren’t looking for or expecting “perfection.” Are there things I could nitpick about France? Sure. But those things fade to insignificance compared to the things we like. So keep that in mind, too: there’s almost certain to be something about your chosen landing spot that you don’t like. But you have to put that in context of the whole.

So, once we decided on France, what made us finally pull the trigger to move from dreaming to planning? Oddly enough, it was an article about former U.S. Representative Jim McDermott moving to France. McDermott spent his entire political career fighting for universal healthcare and other social policies every “developed” country but the United States has (but likely never will). When McDermott took a cooking class in Southwest France after he retired, he decided to buy a place there. And aside from when he comes back to visit family, that’s where he stays. This was the quote from McDermott that did it for us:

I spent 16 years in the Washington state legislature trying to get single-payer health care. Then I spent nearly 30 years in Congress trying to get single-payer. Then I came to France and in three months I had single-payer. Was that mind-blowing? You bet.

Jim McDermott

That did it for us. Things finally clicked. So we stopped dithering around and planned a recon trip over the summer of 2024 and loved it so much we decided to buy a house there. I’ll tell you more about that later.

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Le Musée des Blindés – The Saumur Armor Museum

If you’re an armored vehicle buff as I’ve been since I was a kid, Le Musée des Blindés in Saumur, France, has to be on your bucket list. “The Saumur Armor Museum” has one of the largest armored vehicle collections in the world, and Saumur itself is an amazing city that’s certainly worth visiting.

My wife and I spent an afternoon there (this is my compensation for going to countless yarn and cross-stitch stores with her) oohing and aahing over the heavy metal displays. The museum has vehicles dating from the First World War to the current day, with halls depicting the major periods of armored vehicle development (e.g., First World War, Second World War, Cold War, etc.). Of particular note for Second World War aficionados is the King Tiger, which is the only operable one in the world, and Tiger I #114, which is being restored.

One note for when you visit, however: the museum building isn’t equipped with air conditioning, so if you go during the summer as we did, expect it to be warm and stuffy.

Other than that, though, be prepared for an enjoyable and informative visit!

P.S. I’m going to apologize up front for not putting in alt text for all the photos!

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Liking, Sharing, Tagging, and Reviewing Your Favorite Books

A lot of readers don’t realize just how important the reviews they leave on retail sites are for authors. Reviews are GOLD. Why? Because your opinion matters to other readers. But a lot of readers are put off by the prospect because they think it’s going to take them a lot of time or they’re going to have to write a lengthy synopsis of everything that happened in the book. The fact is that leaving a review is easy as pie and won’t take you more than a minute or two!

Listen, it’s great when folks write in-depth reviews, but leaving just a short blurb is great, too. Think of it this way: if you got on an elevator with someone you know and only had a quick ride between floors to tell them about this book you loved, what would you say? That’s what you’d write in your review. Short, sweet, and from the heart works just fine. “I read this book and LOVED IT!” There, that’s a review!

In addition, most retail sites want you to leave a star rating. How many stars you leave is entirely up to you, and everyone has their own way to do it.

On top of that, liking, sharing, and tagging books on the retail sites and across social media platforms is a huge help to authors! Again, that sounds like it’ll take you foreveer to do, but it’s really only a couple clicks.

So when you finish your next read, please do the author a huge favor and leave a quick review and then let others know what you thought!

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In Her Name, Book 11: Quest For The One

Fans of the In Her Name Saga will be happy to know that the next installment in the series, Quest For The One, is underway and proceeding nicely!

This story takes place across the timeline of some of the previous books, and begins with Tesh-Dar’s return from the Desh-Ka temple, where she cloistered herself at the end of , upon being summoned by the Empress. Tesh-Dar’s task: to find The One spoken of in prophecy that can save their race. A century of warfare with the humans has failed to bring forth their savior, and time is running out.

After a bittersweet reunion with Pan’ne-Sharakh, Tesh-Dar sets forth on her quest, which will take her across many of the worlds at war where the Children of the Empress fight for honor and the glory of the Empress against the humans, in hopes of finding The One she seeks.

Note: I don’t have an estimated publication date for this book yet, as it’s probably going to be the longest novel of the In Her Name series to date. But progress is well underway and my muse is back and happy!

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My Career As An Author: Looking Back, Looking Ahead

I wanted to reflect a bit on how my author journey began. It’s been over 16 years since I published my first book, In Her Name (which was subsequently divided up into Empire, Confederation, and Final Battle). Almost 14 years will have gone by since I sent Season of the Harvest, which was my “breakout book,” to press. Six months later, in August 2011, I resigned from my long-time government job to write full time, and the following April (2012), we moved from Maryland to Sarasota, Florida to enjoy some Gulf Coast sunshine and prime beaches. Then, after six years of writing full time, I found myself heading back to my old day job until I finally retired in July 2023.

I know a lot of folks think a full-time writing gig would be the absolute dream come true, and it was for me, as well – for a time. After getting through some major ups and downs (mostly downs) in terms of book sales – sales would never again reach the heady highs of the summer of 2011, when I was making $30,000 a month from my royalties! – our finances stabilized in 2012 and we did well for a while. The boys came to really like Florida, and my wife and I loved it down there. We also had the opportunity to take long summer trips in our RV with my parents, who own their own RV, and we toured the Southwest, New England, Florida, and some of the National Parks in the Rockies, including Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons.

But then in 2015, book sales started a long, drawn out descent. I can’t attribute that to any specific cause, because there are so many spinning wheels – along with sheer luck – involved in selling books that it’s hard to point to a given thing or two and say, “There, that’s the problem!” If it was that easy, everyone would be a bestselling author, but clearly that’s not the case. Despite doing everything I could think of to stop it, it was clear that my writing career was inexorably sliding into the slush pile, and if we were to continue to make ends meet, I was going to have to go out and get a real job again.

Unfortunately, “real jobs” with wages that would keep us afloat were in short supply, and while I considered myself highly skilled in certain fields after working in the Defense Department for 25 years, those skills were very niche in nature and didn’t translate easily into any of the better paying jobs I was hoping to find. I came to that conclusion pretty quickly, and decided to apply back to the Federal government. I did that in early 2016, was interviewed that summer, and was hired back early in 2017, thankfully before we had to eat too far into our cash reserves as my book royalties fell way below what we needed to stay afloat.

But I think the thing that really tanked my writing to that point was the simple and very bitter fact that my muse had left me. It’s hard to describe to those who haven’t felt it, but it’s like losing sensation in your hands, maybe. It wasn’t writer’s block, but a complete lack of interest in or caring about writing, just utter and total apathy. I tried everything I could think of to lure her back (yes, my muse is definitely a she), but she just wasn’t having any of it.

That was in 2016. It wasn’t until seven years later, when I finally left my last day job in July 2023, that she returned, literally almost overnight. Since then and my writing this post, I finished In Her Name: Red Legion, wrote what’s probably my longest novel (Aria), an as-yet unpublished romance novel, and am about 60,000 words into the eleventh In Her Name novel, Quest For The One. I probably could have finished the latter already, but we’ve been in the midst of moving to France (more on that later), and I’ve also been spending WAY too much time doomscrolling on social media, a habit I’m determined to break.

Upon reflection of all this, I wanted to offer a few thoughts in the hopes that others looking at taking a similar path might have a more pleasant journey.

1) A lot more goes into being an author than just writing books. That seems pretty obvious when it’s stated overtly, but a lot of folks don’t understand just how much of a grind it can be to do the things you have to do every day to try and stay in the game. It takes a huge amount of discipline that’s very hard to muster when you’re the master of your own time and a potential victim of bright, shiny objects. Even just writing, as enjoyable as it was as a hobby, became a chore: I knew I had to write to continue making money, and after a while that became a real drain on my creativity and my muse suffered for it. If anything, my production rate fell after I left my full-time job, and really fell after my sales started a long-term decline, because that’s when desperation set in. That’s not good muse fuel!

2) What is truly frustrating, however, is that even if you do everything right, you may not see the results you want. I’ve seen this with a number of other authors, and in a latent sense suffered it myself. Some might argue to the contrary, but I think a key ingredient an author needs is plain and simple luck. I’ve seen some very successful authors really work social media, while others have virtually no presence at all. Others have great web sites, some don’t. Some have big mailing lists and send out consistent content to their fans, while others don’t bother. Some have great book covers, others are drab, at best. Some stories are mediocre (or worse), while others are amazing. Some do a lot of paid promotions through BookBub and other venues; others don’t bother. Yet, from that hugely mixed bag of do’s and don’ts, some authors and books will spring to the top of the sales lists, while others never make it beyond a few copies here and there. Some will vault to the top and keep one or more books in the top 100 paid, or even top 20 paid, on Amazon (which I use as a weather gauge) consistently and with good hang time, while others spring to the top – usually with a run in BookBub – then fall like a rock shortly thereafter, with almost zero hang time. There is no rhyme or reason to it. You need some of Harry Potter’s “liquid luck.”

4) Spread your net wide in terms of book distribution, and I’ll wager that ebooks will be 90% or more of your sales. I say spread the net wide because, while Amazon is the 800 pound gorilla, income from other outlets can add up to a substantial amount. At one point during the golden months of my sales, Amazon accounted for probably 80% of my royalties. Now, Amazon sales make up about 50%. Aside from Google Play, which I publish to directly, I decided some time back to just aggregate everything else (Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and others) through Draft2Digital for the sake of convenience. But my royalties from Google plus what I make through everything feeding through Draft2Digital is now almost as much as what I make from Amazon. Granted, it takes a while to build an audience in the non-Amazon book channels, but if you’re persistent, over time it can pay off. Amazon exclusivity can certainly be leveraged to good effect, but sole distribution there is not necessarily a good thing.

5) I don’t really have any regrets, but if I could spin back the clock I would do a few things differently. For one thing, especially when the royalties were flooding in that first year (2011) – I made $30,000 a month in June, July, and August alone – I would’ve banked every penny of it and continued working my day job for at least another year, living off my government salary alone, before resigning. That would’ve done a couple things. First, I would’ve had a very nice nest egg saved away before I left government service. Second, that would’ve given me time to gauge the movement of the book market and sales: as it happened, right after I resigned in August, my sales plunged for the next four months before finally turning around, although they never reached the levels of the summer of 2011. Third, it would’ve saved me from making some really stupid “the sky’s the limit” financial decisions that turned out to be dreadful mistakes. If you take away nothing else from reading my tale, remember this: do not ever, ever make any assumptions about your sales in the coming month, let alone the coming year(s). Today’s bestseller is on tomorrow’s backlist, and even authors that consistently crank out books don’t always stay above water. Finally, it would’ve given me a bit more of a chance to see if I really enjoyed being an author over a longer stretch of time, because enjoying writing and being an author are not necessarily the same thing.

6) Authors tend to lead solitary work lives, for obvious reasons. Sure, you may interact with fans, fellow authors, collaborate on projects, etc. – there are plenty of opportunities to socialize. But the work of writing itself, unless you’re one of those folks who finds a good collaboration partner, is a lone wolf occupation that, especially after we moved to Sarasota, I found was just not for me. My entire career in the government revolved around teamwork, and while I’m an introvert, that is the sort of work environment in which I thrived. Being an author turned out to be an unbearably lonely occupation, and I think contributed quite a bit to my falloff in productivity. At some point I began to really hate it and grew impossibly bored, neither of which can be good! So, before you embark on a full-time career as an author, you need to have a firm understanding of yourself and your inner motivations, along with what makes you happy and satisfied in terms of work. You may hate your current job and think that being a full-time author would be the bomb, but in reality that may or may not be the case.

7) Be honest with yourself about what you want to do, and don’t be afraid to adapt. For example, as much as I hated to have to leave Sarasota and return to Maryland for work, that made the most sense from every angle in our situation. It sucked, but it was the right thing to do at the time. I would wager that most published authors have full-time jobs to keep a roof over their heads, and the money they earn through writing is dressing on the side. I “made it” for a while, and have sold or given away as promo copies over a million books and made over a million bucks in my writing journey, but didn’t quite have the escape velocity to make the big leagues like some have. Book publishing is a lot like a huge beach with ever-shifting sands: sometimes you don’t move much at all, sometimes you move a huge distance, and sometimes you move around a lot and wind up back where you started. The key thing is to not cling to something too tightly when the tide’s pulling you out: start swimming and stay afloat. And the truth is, you just never know: authors who’ve been on the backlists for years sometimes make huge comebacks. Tomorrow’s full of possibilities.

Anyway, there are a few thoughts for what they may be worth. I hope they give you some good food for thought.

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Bobcats Come A-Calling!

While staying with my dad in Phoenix for a bit, my wife and I were sitting out on the patio when a flock of quail that had been nibbling their way through the yard went berserk! A few moments later, a bobcat appeared, walking right along the rear fence, maybe twenty or so feet away. Then a second. And a third! They all made themselves at home on the neighbor’s patio, hoping against hope that something would come out of the drain hole at the bottom of the wall (which just passes through to the patio).

Then, after a while they got bored and moved on. Gorgeous animals.

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IN HER NAME: RED LEGION - getting closer!

I finished another new chapter for RED LEGION today! We’re closing in on this sucker FINALLY getting done!!