Marty Essen's Blog, page 296
February 23, 2018
Time Is Irreverent: Canadian Best Seller
If you follow my posts, you know: “Time Is Irreverent” wasn’t supposed to be published until March 1st, but a miscommunication with Amazon resulted in an accidental publication date of February 7. I wasn’t prepared and was in a near-panic because none of my promotions were in order.
I quickly did what I could on short notice, and things started happening. This screen shot from Amazon in Canada greeted me this morning. Gotta love the Best Seller logo they added! In the last few days, “Time Is Irreverent” has been a Canadian #1 Best-Seller in Political Humour, LGBT Science Fiction, and Time Travel. It also hit #2 in Satire and Alternative History.
My initial big American push starts today and runs through Wednesday. With a little luck, perhaps that Best Seller logo will appear on Amazon’s American website as well. And if you’ve already read my book, you will be a hero to me if you would post a short review on Amazon in the coming days.
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Who knows?
Marty’s photo of the day #2465: Sorry, I don’t know what kind of plant this is. All I can tell you is that I photographed it while exploring western Spain in 2003. Whatever it is, it’s pretty cool.
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February 22, 2018
So many guns, so many questions
When Republicans say that mental illness is the problem, not guns, I’m never sure how to respond.
Should I ask why mental illness is such a huge problem in the United States, but not Great Britain and Australia? Or should I agree, proclaim that the best indicator of mental illness is owning an assault rifle, and suggest that all such people be institutionalized immediately?
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A shot to warm you up
Marty’s photo of the day #2464: I think we need a warm-weather shot today. Costa Rica!
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February 21, 2018
The day I held up the world
Marty’s photo of the day #2463: I can’t believe it’s been fifteen years since I held up the world! This excerpt from my book Cool Creatures, Hot Planet: Exploring the Seven Continents explains the shot:
I had a debt to pay for our successful Antarctica landing. Besides Shackleton and Neptune, another larger-than-life being had been guiding our expedition. Now, on Antarctica, I could finally follow through with the favor I had promised to Atlas.
Before taking on such a Herculean task, however, I wanted to give Deb my camera so she could snap a photo for posterity. I waited until she had walked most of the way down the glacier before calling out, “Deb, I need you!”
When she arrived, I glanced down at the guano-stained snow. The penguins on the lower section of the glacier added an unexpected element. Had I been thinking, I would have made use of the clean snow near the summit. Oh well, a promise is a promise. I leaned over, pushed the top of my head against the glacier, propped my hands out on either side for balance, and lifted my legs straight into the air. Anywhere else I would have been doing a headstand, but here on Antarctica I was holding up the world!
Perhaps you remember a brief unexplained sensation of falling on February 21, 2003. I could only hold the world for a few seconds—just long enough to provide a short break—and Atlas wasn’t ready to get it back so soon. We almost fumbled the exchange.
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February 20, 2018
Northern California Coast
Marty’s photo of the day #2462: Today we go scenic with a photo I took several years ago while on a speaking tour in northern California.
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February 19, 2018
Vervet monkey
Marty’s photo of the day #2461: This is a vervet monkey, photographed in Zimbabwe.
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February 18, 2018
Writing fiction is more scary than writing nonfiction
Now that I have written two nonfiction nature-travel books and one science-fiction political-comedy, I have to say that writing fiction is more fun than nonfiction, but also more frightening.
With “Cool Creatures, Hot Planet: Exploring the Seven Continents” and “Endangered Edens,” I was pretty much limited to telling stories of adventures that I had already lived through, making them as funny as possible, and adding some biting political commentary.
With my new novel, “Time Is Irreverent,” I had to make everything up. Sure President Handley is obviously based on Donald Trump, and I have either visited or lived in most of the places Marty Mann and Nellie Dixon passed through on their epic road trip across global warming-ravaged America in 2056, but other than that, the adventure came from deep inside my brain.
Actually, just as every religion ever invented has members who claim to have had a personal experience with their god, I had the same personal experience with my characters. When Nellie Dixon entered the story, both she and Marty Mann took over the typing. I sat back and let them dictate to my fingers what to type next. In fact, I vividly remember typing late one night and then reluctantly going to bed while Nellie was in peril. I honestly didn’t know how—or even if—she would survive. I barely slept and was up early the next morning to find out her fate.
Sure, deep down I knew my characters were creations of my imagination, and that all the outrageous things that Marty and Nellie did were really a part of me, but I tried not to think in terms of reality for fear of losing the magic that was happening.
I wrote what for me would have been the ultimate novel to read if I were buying it for my own entertainment. So far, the reviews have been good, and people are liking my creation. Nevertheless, I know that some will read the book and not even chuckle at what I think is hilarious, and others will be upset with the book’s politics.
When those first bad reviews come in, they’ll be hard to take because my first instinct will be to interpret them as a rejection of a tour of my brain. I will need to rely heavily on a sentence I’ve said to myself many times over the years: “Not everyone likes the Rolling Stones.” In other words, no matter what a person does, in any art form, there will always be someone who doesn’t like it.
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Jesus Christ, they are fast!
Marty’s photo of the day #2460: This is a young Jesus Christ lizard, ready to make his on-top-of-the-water run. The lizards do their run on their hind legs and are hilarious to watch.
(Photographed in Costa Rica. From my book, Endangered Edens: Exploring the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Costa Rica, the Everglades, and Puerto Rico.)
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February 17, 2018
The Golden Age of Right-Wing Cultism
There’s no point in holding back: Republicans are gullible and stupid! In this morning’s Missoulian, Montana Republican State Senator Albert Olszewski accused the Democrats of holding our military ransom for almost a decade.
How much money do we need to give our military? We already spend more on defense than the next nine most powerful countries combined. But hey, it sounds good to go after Democrats for not shoveling more money at the biggest money waster the world has ever known, and Republican leaders know that fetish patriots get-off on being upset at any alleged disrespect of our military. When you have no ethics, it’s easy to make up shit to keep the crackpots engaged.
In a related issue, earlier this week Laura Ingraham of Fox News told LeBron James to “shut up an dribble,” because the Cleveland Cavaliers star dared to talk about politics. Similarly, Ingraham wrote a book, “Shut Up and Sing,” because she was upset about musicians getting political.
Republicans love Laura Ingraham and savor her words as if they came from an actual human being. But did it ever occur to them just how incongruous and moronic it is of them to believe sports and musical entertainers should shut up, when their demigod, Ronald Reagan, was an actor, and their “ordained-by-God” president, Donald Trump, was a game show host?
There is absolutely no doubt that historians are going to look back at this era and call it the “Golden Age of Right-Wing Cultism.”
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