Athol Kay's Blog, page 10

Ornamental Publication Date: Apparently My Book is For Sale

So apparently setting a publication date for your book on Createspace, isn’t the same as having a release date.

I’ve got the book all edited and uploaded to Createspace and very carefully pick July 4th as the publication date. I figured that would give me time to play the sales push game without becoming obnoxious about it. I’ve also got a fair amount to get through by July 4th to follow up the book, so it’s all coming together. I’m exhausted from the blur that is looking at your own work until your eyes bleed. I push the button to approve printing with the same drama a movie President authorizes a nuclear strike.

The book shows up on Amazon quite quickly. Book is in pre-order and will ship on July 4th. If the price drops before then, they will match it. Awesome.

I take a bleary eyed nap and then go about the business of formatting for the Kindle version. Book still in pre-order. Cool.

The next morning people on the forum start squealing they buying the book. Yay pre-orders, I feel awesome. Then they say it’s already shipped!

WTF? Yup, the book is live. Dammit. Call Amazon, they say it’s a Createspace issue. Call Createspace, they say I approved it. I say noooooooooooo, I very carefully selected July 4th. They tell me that all I’m selecting is a line of text, there’s no actual functionality to the publication date decision. Whaaaaaaaaaaat?

I can either just enjoy the ride, or shut the entire book down and reactivate it later, say on July 1st, hoping that it’s all the way turned on again for July 4th. Except it might not be. The 800,000lb Amazonian gorilla does book magic and it’s a little random as to when it works.

So the publication date is basically ornamental?

Yeah it is, sorry about that.

Ugh… First World Problems.

Anyway, 100,000 new books hit Amazon each month… so I decide to stay low and not annoy the sleeping Kraken. I crunch the Kindle version out. It’s all on.

The book is here…

 

There’s other stuff happening behind the scenes, but I’ll get to that in a day or two. For now, if you can buy a book and get the initial wave going, it’s amazingly helpful to me.

 

Explaining The “In Her Or On Her” Rule

Forum issue…. spent a long time triaging this case and everything went back to the husband having a porn/Internet addiction. As in we figured out the exact month everything started falling apart being when they first had cable Internet installed. Literally a bright motivated guy one month and starting to flunk out of college the next. Then over a decade of unemployment and underemployment after that. Her carrying about 80% of the income load while he stayed home and jerked off to porn. Long story short, I gave her a full and complete triage experience, she unleashed ”Option A or B” on him, he went for Option A.

Which brings us to this post. One of my suggestions that was part of Option A was to adopt the “In her or on her” rule. Meaning where his semen ends up. i.e. no jerking off to porn, if he’s having an orgasm, it’s with her in some way shape or form. Don’t care where he comes, just as long as it’s with her.

Then comes the hamstring questions. What if she’s not available, or doesn’t want to? Or other reason to get around the rule. Squeaky squeak squeakum.

My response…

(1) He’s the addict, so anything he says isn’t reasonable or valid related to the addiction.

(2) He’s allowing himself to have his brain be rewired to experience her as the outlet for his sexuality.

(3) Given long enough (months) doing (2) will make his brain eroticize her to him. Just like he’s conditioned himself to particular porn to be a turn-on, now he’s conditioning himself to be turned-on by her. Yes that’s “artificial”, but it will feel completely real when it’s done.

(4) Like any form of hunger, the longer it goes between feedings, the greater his desire to be fed. So if she is unavailable (work) or unwilling (I expect somewhat rarely), all that does is make him more interested in her and more attracted to her. If he routinely masturbates without her, then he basically messes up the entire program. The orgasming without her is the entire problem.

(5) What he’ll come to learn is that 99% of eroticism lies in the feeling of being turned-on. After he orgasms, it’s over. It seems very counter intuitive I know, but he’ll actually find a more satisfying sexual experience on the other side of this process. It’s really not robbing him of anything.

(6) Without the endless dopamine chasing of the porn/Internet addiction, he’ll find greater personal focus in his life as a whole. He’ll think better. Perform better. This is a real addiction he’s been facing and it’s terribly draining on him.

(7) Monogamy isn’t exactly easy. It’s not for me. I’m a higher desire person than Jennifer, but it’s the experience of being turned-on that’s the most enjoyable thing. By a conscious focus limiting myself to her, it actually is sexually frustrating in a positive sense. Much of Oneitis is simply a biological response to sexual frustration coupled with an emotional focus on a single woman. As long as she is a basically good wife, it’s pretty freaking enjoyable.

Or in other words, the “in you or on you” rule may seem like a gimmick, and to an extent it is. But it’s also going to work to make him find her more sexually attractive and help him fall in love with her again.

And even if the process to make that happen is artificial, the feelings he’ll experience as a result of it will be real.

The caveat to all this being that she’s actually into him. She’s been a total Nice Girl slaving away supporting him and being sexually cut off by him. She wants to lay him like tile.

Jennifer:  This can also be a lot of fun for her. We don’t often skip nights but the positive change in Athol’s attention toward me is noticeable the longer it goes since the last time we had sex. It’s nice to be the focus of that level of desire. Now if a girl was mildly evil…

Long Term Relationship Count: 3 + 1 = 4

Just reading Susan’s Cohabitation Blues post and got a memory jag about something I can’t remember if I already wrote about or not.

So…

Men will always be lied to about female partner count. You may as well just accept that. Yeah I know some tiny handful of women don’t lie about partner count, but they look like all the ones that do, so lots of luck figuring which is which. Plus the ones who aren’t lying probably aren’t terribly strongly sexually motivated, or are still “mint in box”, which is potentially another curve ball to think about.

However, women will tell you how many guys they’ve lived with like it’s a badge of honor. It’s a proper relationship, NOT at all slutty or remotely questionable. It’s all on the up and up. Not a problem. She’s an Official Girlfriend(TM) and putting out officially. Besides, the only difference between living together and being married is “a piece of paper”.

Right?

Ah okay, let’s say you’re right.

So rather than worry about a couple of one night stands, or that thing that happened on vacation in Mexico, or anything that happened in high school… or drunk.. or in Vegas… let’s just count the cohabitations. Then you just add +1 to the total to see where you would fall in the progression should you take the next step with her.

So if she’s had three cohabitations, if you marry her, you should think of yourself being her fourth husband.

 

I’m Ready, I’m Ready, I’m Ready, I’m Ready, I’m Ready

Endlessly refreshing the tracking screen showing your new books coming to you, is what enables them to arrive on time….

There’s still some left available for the fifty signed copies. Have $50, live in the US and email me at athol.kay@gmail.com.

I Had This Idea For A Show

Angeline:  I nominate @RPN to be @Athol_Kay’s first client on his reality TV show, where he installs video cams and dissects the beta fuckups, via earpiece.

Athol Kay is

… AlphaNanny.

Athol:  Actually… I’d take a deeper analysis approach. I don’t care about the Beta screw-ups, I want to get into the history and discover the actual source issues for all this.

It would be more like Law and Order. 

Mona: Yeah, but we all know which show would get higher ratings.

Athol:  Yeah the smart guy one that unearths the elephants and other assorted drama.

It starts off like a cross between Numb3rs and Cheaters, then goes into a cross between Dr Phil and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.

Tell me you wouldn’t watch that shit.

So anyway… lets play the imaginary show game. What should my show be like?

Jennifer:  Anything, just as I’m not in it lol!

New Book: The Mindful Attraction Plan

The first thing a current MMSL reader is going to think on looking at the cover is, “Wow that looks just like a Blue Pill fluff book. Did Athol just sell out?”

If that’s what you’re thinking, then the cover looks perfect. It’s a Red Pill book, that looks, feels and sounds like it’s Blue Pill. The overall arc of the content is Red Pill, but I just don’t announce it with trumpets and sounding pissed off at the world. There’s no rage moments, it’s not scary, it’s relaxed even. It just quietly trickles little nuggets out along the way. It’s about as close as to making the Red Pill taste like strawberries as anyone will ever get. By the time you get to the push comes to shove part of the book, it seems utterly reasonable from even a Blue Pill perspective.

Your next thought is going to be, “Hey… Mindful Attraction Plan = MAP. What happened to the MAP?”

The short answer to that it’s a way of rebranding slightly, without throwing away the MAP acronym. The longer answer involves trademark concerns and some market positioning decisions. Overall though, the Male Action Plan principles are basically unchanged in the Mindful Attraction Plan. That being said, The Mindful Attraction Plan is amazingly focused on showing you exactly how to run your MAP.

The first part of the book is a very clear description of exactly how you become more attractive as fast as possible. I cover six areas of development you need to focus on – (1) Physical Fitness and Health, (2) Money and Material Possessions, (3) Displays of High Value, (4) Building Relationship Comfort, (5) Personality and Preferences, (6) High-Energy Sex. Within each area there’s a traffic light color coded system for things you need to do. Red = Stop It, Yellow = Fix It, Green = Do It. There’s no confusion about what you should be doing to improve your attractiveness and I even cover the exact order of importance your addressing things needs to follow. The (1) to (6) order is very important for example.

The second part of the book is about taking your new attraction and leveraging that into getting what you want. You guys will of course recognize the Phases of the MAP from the Primer, but that was just a single chapter in the Primer… this is the entire eleven chapters of the second half of the book. It’s clearer, more consistent and far more seasoned in its approach and expectations. So even if the book starts off feeling light, it slowly moves to a hard edged frame that you’ll be willing to take it to an ultimatum and not flinch about it if you have to.

It’s a really, really good book. If you have some Nice Guy friend trapped in a awful relationship, this is the book that will give them hope that a positive change is both possible and reasonable.

In comparison to the Primer, The Mindful Attraction Plan as a direct focus on how to run the MAP, is always polite, explains the connections between attraction building in all areas of your life, written for both a male and female audience, expands the MAP principles to employer and social group situations, and is simple to understand and get started. Also very importantly, it’s something you can openly read without fear your spouse is going to start flipping out on you for “reading some stupid sex book and trying to control me”. It’s a cooperative approach.

In terms of content, there’s about a 20% overlap between this book and The Primer. The Primer is by no means a waste of money or pointless to read now. The Mindful Attraction Plan content has also not appeared on the blog and isn’t “reused blog posts”. It’s all written from scratch.

And table of contents and back cover to see as well.

Anyway… the call to action…

I’ve just pushed the buttons on Createspace, so it’s a few days until you’ll see it appearing on Amazon and the release date is 7/4/13 for print ($16.99) and Kindle ($9.99) and it’s 196 pages as a 6″x9″. Woo-hoo! Independence Day!

However, if you have $50 and want a signed copy early, email me at athol.kay@gmail.com. I’m only doing this for fifty copies though. I’m crazy busy with other secret stuff and Jennifer seriously hates standing in line at the post office.

The Great Material Continuum

Continuing on from yesterday’s cliffhanger…

In the movie version of my life, the last four years would look like a five minute cut scene of me making Ironman suits. Stirring music and me all slick, shiny and flying about yelling “Woo-Hoo!”. Instead it’s been way more like playing the role of Chief O’Brien…

…anyway.

April 8th I threw away everything I had written to date and started from scratch.

Everything just feel into place. The entire four years worth of crap suddenly meaningful as a dozen dark clouds decided to dump the silver linings on me en mass.

Simple. Light. Clean. Fresh. The easiest writing I think I’ve ever done.

Final pushing and it’s 417am, but I’ve finished editing the book. Have a cover. Just got the uploading to Createspace and Kindle to get done and planning a 7/4/13 release date. I’ll tell y’all more about it tomorrow… Oh I guess I mean later today. I’m so sleepy.

Author and book are doing well.

How The MMSL Sausage is Made

I tried to break from nursing in 2006 go into real estate sales. You can match the exact hour the bottom fell out of the housing market to getting my real estate license printed. Maybe it’s my ego talking here, but I’m pretty sure the housing crash was my fault.

I tried way too hard and too long. We basically lost our entire nest egg trying to make a go of real estate.

I went back to nursing in 2008.

By late 2009 it becomes apparent that the lack of pay raises from our non-profit jobs and increase in fuel / heating oil is slowly taking us down and we need either to bail on the house, or we need 10-12k increased income a year.

Also by late 2009 it’s become apparent that I have the prototype ideas for MMSL and they seem potentially marketable. Jennifer and I have a long talk about it, it’s going to be on my real name. I’m out of ideas for how else we can get ahead. This seems like it. Jennifer agrees.

Jan 2010 I start the MMSL blog, the goal being to write the blog, turn it into a book and make MMSL my “part-time job” hopefully making that 10-12k a year. We’re still drifting backwards into debt though. Hopefully the Blog to Book approach turns into a Book to Expert jump as well. Expert gets the big payoff… eventually.

In mid 2010 we cashed out my quite moderate 401k to pay down credit cards and have money to promote the then to be written Primer. In August 2010 we spent a fair amount of that cash to say goodbye to dad in New Zealand. He died in November 2010. I wasn’t a happy camper then.

2010 winter was beyond horrible with oil heat and record snow. Furnace broke. Both cars needed $1000 repairs. We can’t pay the mortgage by Feb 2011.

Defer the taxes and publish the Primer end of March 2011 with literally no money for anything other than uploading the book. That’s why the cover looks like it does.

Get offered national media attention due to a viral post about Jennifer and I having sex nearly every day of our marriage. Inside Edition calls, we get interviewed and are on national television. We are now 100% public and basically outed in real life to any and all friends and family… and our jobs as well. We get dragged to Human Resources for being dangerously monogamous or something. The blog gets an extra 800 hits, no sales spike. Inside Edition was pointless. Fuck.

At least the the Primer income keeps us afloat all 2011. I think I get to actually spend my first “book money” for something fun around Thanksgiving 2011.

Primer keeps selling, by March 2012 I’m basically exhausted from working nursing full time and answering 2-4 hours of email a day for MMSL. Put my notice in. Done with nursing in May 2012.

Try writing revised Primer. Bleh. Have an outline, but really just feels like moving everything around rather than “better”. I give up trying to write the Primer second edition.

State of Connecticut says I can’t do MMSL stuff as coaching as it is too close to marriage counseling. Ugh. Start the MMSL forum instead… see where that goes.

Try writing revised Primer second attempt. Bleh bleh bleh. Just shuffling things around rather than improving them. Give up again.

Primer still selling reasonably well. Have a seminar retreat weekend for the Army. Goes fairly well, but endless drama before the weekend getting books printed for the weekend. Endless drama getting paid after the weekend. Final summary, about six weeks work prepping for weekend, final summary made about $2000 after expenses. Army funding change, no further interest in more retreats.

Make third attempt to revise Primer, hate it. I get about 20% into writing it and just feel overwhelmed with dread, depression and darkness. It’s good writing, but… still meh.

Hatch plan for little “Red Pill Rule Book”, make great progress and get to 95% complete. Put on hold due to interest from third party in turning everything into a partnership and bringing everything to market as a seminar empire. I have intellectual capital, they have financial capital and prior experience in training industry. Needs a new Primer revision to base everything off. Okay. Doing it. We’re on our way finally. Jennifer stops being “supportive wife” and becomes “believing wife”, a subtle but important change.

Running the forum slowly sucking the life force from me. It’s meant to suck up all the email contact I was trying to handle, but never quite becomes something I can step away from without running off the rails.

Dec 2012 - Feb 2013 making some progress on bringing revised Primer content… the fourth attempt at it. Insights from the forum are useful. Fly to California for meet and greet with potential partner. All going well. All going well. All going… silence… dread… fuck. Partner reports his wife will likely become screaming banshee and destroy everything publicly. I’m out. About as mutual and sad of a parting of the ways as anyone could expect. Truly.

I ask Jennifer to be CEO of whatever it is I do. Her Pepper Potts, me Tony Stark. She accepts. We brainstorm new approach. Go time.

March 2013. I start writing the Primer revision for now the fifth time. BEAST MODE ACTIVATED. I’ve got everything now. This is a true Primer revision. It’s like the old Primer, just better laid out, more insight, fixing everything. Stronger, harder, richer, funny as hell and darker. Much darker. It’s truthful, but brutal as a runaway combine harvester. I have 80 pages of perfect pain written… and I can’t write anything more. It just feels so… wrong.

April 8th 2013 I throw them all away…

Jennifer:  That has a sense of doom to it.

Athol:  Oh. It’s meant to be a cliffhanger.

Jennifer: You kinda suck sometimes you know that right?

Athol:  I’m adorable though.

Jennifer:  /sigh  Dammit.

 

Fuck You and Fuck Your Elbow

So anyway… about two and a half months ago in the gym, I broke my personal record on the evil Leg Press machine. I had a light jabbing pain inside my head though, up high, toward the back on the right hand side.

No problem.

My next leg day, I added another 10 pounds to my personal record. I also had a medium jabbing pain inside my head, up high, toward the back on the right hand side.

No problem.

The next leg day, I added another 10 pounds to my personal record. I also had a bad jabbing pain inside my head… guess where… yeah…  up high, toward the back on the right hand side.

Okay fuck, that’s not right.

So I stopped. That’s about it. I never passed out, never had headaches, no vision issues, felt completely fine otherwise. I’ve just got zero interest in popping something in my head and spending the rest of my life drooling and only smiling when Jennifer comes to visit me in the nursing home.

So I did a fair bit of cardio for a while, skipped some days and I was pretty sick with an allergies + sinus + almost pneumonia thing there for a couple weeks too.

Anyway, first true leg day for a while. It went okay. I’ve lost a little strength, but not that much. I’ve also started doing this thing where after working out I go home and add up the total weight I’ve lifted, as in 100lbs x 10 reps = 1000lbs. I always knew leg day was heavier than arm day, but the total weight lifted is about 60-70% more for me. Leg day is brutal.

So I guess all I’m saying is take it all the way up to Fuck You and Fuck Your Elbow, then peg it back just a notch or two. You still have to push it, but you don’t have to break yourself to be a man. The goal is to feel good, not feel bad.

Oh and the counting the total weight thing. Just have to beat the last total weight lifted by 1%. That’s it. I figure the goal might as well be something positive than thinking about getting injured as the gold standard of being committed. Just 1% better. That’s it.

Jennifer: …

Athol:  And no I wasn’t dying. I just wanted to use the video lol.

Framing the Official Relationship History

The half of the couple who is in charge, is the one who gets to take the official meeting minutes of the relationship. As long as the relationship is going well, this isn’t a concern because the official meeting minutes reflect the happy harmony of the relationship.

But on the rare occasions the relationship has some minor points of interpersonal discussion, requiring greater thought as to the structural situations in which the happy couple periodically finds itself at sub-optimal levels of unification on a temporary issue, the official meeting minutes of the relationship, become an important resource to clarify the memories of prior statements of mutual agreement, to the appropriate course of action for exactly the circumstances in which discussion wishes to take place and as the matter has already been settled before the present point of time, this entire debate amounts to a potentially offensive reopening of a closed matter, as the expectation remains that talks made in good faith will be honored and not discarded on a whim, especially when additional plans have already been made with outside parties and costs borne predicated on the original agreement, thus it remains not only a reasonable expectation that the plans of action unfolds as mutually intended and agreed upon, it is in fact going to be damaging to attempt to not proceed and therefore is doubly justified as the only possible thing to do at present.

Or perhaps put more plainly…

“We’ve already talked about this. You agreed that I could have a weekend away with the girls, you can’t change your mind on me now, I’ve already got plane tickets and booked the hotel.”

“I didn’t think you were going to Vegas though, you said it was the beach house.”

“What? No! You agreed that I could have a weekend away with the girls. The beach house was only one idea of a possible place. We decided on Vegas as a group after that.”

“I don’t think that’s how it happened, you said the beach house.”

“Okay, well now we have this problem again where you can’t remember conversations we’ve had. You don’t pay attention. I have to remember everything, and I clearly remember that you agreed I could have a weekend away with the girls.”

As you can see, if she controls the official meeting minutes of the relationship, she gets to be the one that remembers the relationship correctly. Which means she controls the entire frame of the relationship history. Which means if she’s fallen out of love with you, your entire relationship will be rewritten to frame you as some loser she was putting up with and her as the long suffering spouse. Thus explaining, when driven to the breaking point, the need to seek solace in the arms of another.

This mind control tactic is called Gaslighting.  And yes of course men can do the same thing to women too. I’ve seen victims of both sexes come stumbling onto the forum with having experienced Cardassian levels of mental conditioning.

Anyway…

If there is a patron saint of hamster, it’s Sir Humphrey…

Jennifer:  It’s nice to be Athol’s editor and ensure his postings are officially official.