My New Release
I think you all know by now that I am a lazy-ass at heart. Yes, I go hiking. Yes, I swim. Yes, I practice yoga (sometimes) and martial arts (other times). The truth is, however, that all these pastimes are simply preventive medicine, things I do to avoid becoming the sort of 900-lb blob that has to be cut out of his house and transported to the hospital in the back of a cattle truck. At the core of my being, I'm a lazy bastard and not an outdoorsman or fitness freak. I like to eat, I like to sit on the couch and watch Simon & Simon while sipping Irish whiskey and digesting legally prescribed marijuana edibles, and that's just the truth of it.
There is one area of my life, however, in which I am not only not lazy, but highly industrious: when it comes to writing, I work like goddamn stevedore. Thomas the Tank Engine's got nothing on me. "Prolific" is a pretty good descriptor of the pile of meat, bone and vital juice labeled Miles Girard Watson. But being prolific doesn't mean publishing prolifically. After a huge flurry of publications in 2016 -- two novels and a book of 13 short stories, several of which I wrote specifically for the collection -- I have only written. I have not published.
The reason for this is partly due to the fact that I so glutted the market with my works that only the first one, CAGE LIFE, really got any attention. It got a lot of attention, and continues to -- it's won two major awards and was runner-up to a third -- but its sequel, KNUCKLE DOWN, and the collection, DEVILS YOU KNOW, have been somewhat neglected by yours truly in the advertising department. The bitterbrush truth of it is that I don't have the financial resources to promote all three books simultaneously. Releasing them in such close proximity was therefore probably a mistake, but as Ray Bradbury said, we build our wings on the way down. I'm still learning the process of marketing, even as I work my fingers to well-worn bone banging out more short stories, more novelettes, more novellas, and more novels.
One thing I have learned -- somewhat to my surprise -- is that a certain amount of social media crowing is necessary to drive sales. This is a surprise because when I dropped my first novel, I couldn't believe how little Facebook ads were worth in terms of actual units sold. Nearly every other marketing technique I tried was more effective that supposedly "vital" Facebook ads: in the end they seemed a total waste of money. And perhaps they still would be even if I were using them. A little trumpet fanfare on my own Facebook pages, however, plus a few mentions on Twitter and so forth, really drove sales of my last release, "Killing Time" -- my objective, to penetrate the top 100 Kindle sellers, was more than achieved when I briefly laid claim to the #17 slot.
Why am I mentioning this? Am I just humble-bragging my roundabout way to some distant point? No. I mention it because I have a new release to crow about, and while Goodreads is not social media, it is online, and has the benefit (unlike Facebook) of being composed entirely of people who actually like to read. So, to cases.
Today I released a novelette, "The Numbers Game," on Amazon. (For those of you unfamiliar with the term, a novelette is a story of 7,500 - 17,000 words -- longer than a short story but shorter than a novella.) The pedigree of this tale is worthy of a few lines in itself, but before I get to that, here is its description as it reads on Amazon:
The Battle of Britain rages. London is in flames, and civilization itself totters on the brink. Does Pilot Officer Maurice Mickelwhite care? Not one damn. He may be one of the better fighter pilots in the Royal Air Force, but it's not by choice. Maurice is a mathematical genius, who, if not for Hitler, would be happily teaching algebra and calculus at university. To hell with the war! Maurice just wants his numbers.
Trouble is...the numbers also want him."
As you can see, "The Numbers Game" is a war story. As I hope you can discern from that rather terse description, it is also a comedy...a very black comedy about the statistical probability of surviving one of the deadliest trades on earth: flying combat.
Like many of my stories, it has very deep roots indeed. When I was still basically a child, no more than twelve or so, I read about an incident which supposedly happened to the Red Baron, Manfred von Richtofen, in which some tactless shitwit told him that he had already outlived his mathematical chances for survival and was living on borrowed time. Perhaps not coincidentally, the seemingly invincible flying ace, the greatest of WW1, was killed in action not long afterward. This got me thinking (even at twelve) about the contrast between the cold, statistical numbers and the hot reality of human psychology. Cut to April of 2017. I am visiting London with my family, in part because my brother invited me, in part to celebrate the British magazine ZEALOT SCRIPT awarding me their "Book of the Year" award for 2016. Lying in my bed in Battersea...or maybe it was Clapham, I never did get that straight and I'm not sure the English have, either...I was working on a story when, as these things do, the idea for another story suddenly ignited within my brain. Being in London, and having just visited the underground command center Churchill used during the Battle of Britain, my thoughts had turned to the great air war which raged over Europe between 1939 - 1945. At the same time, encountering English accents everyday -- and Welsh, and Northern Irish, and a few Scots and a Geordie or two -- I was immediately reminded of one of my favorite authors, Derek Robinson, a prolific Briton who penned some of the greatest war novels ever written (if you haven't read Piece of Cake or War Story, you really ought to), and who understands the psychology of the fighter pilot better than any other writer I've ever read. Finally, I'd also just finished the great actor Michael Caine's autobiography. Caine, who was born Maurice Mickelwhite, grew up during The Blitz in WW2, and knows a lot about what it's like to look up at the sky and see it filled with fire.
Out of all of this, then, came "The Numbers Game." It is the story of a man whose passion is mathematics, but who ends up flying combat against what seem to be unending hordes of German aircraft. Day in, day out, for weeks, months, and eventually, years, Maurice straps himself in to 5,600 lbs of Hawker Hurricane and flies against the best pilots in Hitler's aerial army. Some days he gets the better of them, and some days, they get the better of his mates. But Maurice always seems to make it. Soon, he begins to wonder: just how long can he make it? What is the maximum life expectancy of a fighter pilot in wartime? Is it possible for him to calculate the day, the very hour he himself will go down in flames?
If you read my books or my short stories, or even this blog, you already know that human behavior obsesses me. Like Eddie Felson in The Color of Money, I consider myself "a student of human moves," a self-proclaimed expert on the human heart, and the reaction of more or less ordinary people to extreme stress has always been a source of fascination. For a fighter pilot flying combat on an almost daily, and in some cases a twice or thrice-daily, basis, the feeling that their last hour may be now is a constant experience. So too is the knowledge that death, when it comes, may not be swift and painless but instead fiery and terrible. When your squadron mates are getting killed left and right, sometimes literally in front of you, it's very hard to pretend you're immortal.
And what is the effect of all this stress, all this sudden and extreme terror, on the human mind, even a mind as disciplined and logical as Maurice Mickelwhite's? For the answer, at least my take on it anyway, you must read "The Numbers Game." But don't get annoyed at me. It's only 99 cents, and available instantaneously for download onto your Kindle, tablet, phone, or even your PC. And by this weekend, I hope to have a softcover version available for delivery via Amazon.
As I said at the beginning of this epistle, I work very hard at what I do: I just haven't been as prolific at publishing as I have at writing. Well, in
2019, I am endeavoring to share the fruit of these unseen labors with you.
Cheers.
Miles Watson
The Numbers Game
There is one area of my life, however, in which I am not only not lazy, but highly industrious: when it comes to writing, I work like goddamn stevedore. Thomas the Tank Engine's got nothing on me. "Prolific" is a pretty good descriptor of the pile of meat, bone and vital juice labeled Miles Girard Watson. But being prolific doesn't mean publishing prolifically. After a huge flurry of publications in 2016 -- two novels and a book of 13 short stories, several of which I wrote specifically for the collection -- I have only written. I have not published.
The reason for this is partly due to the fact that I so glutted the market with my works that only the first one, CAGE LIFE, really got any attention. It got a lot of attention, and continues to -- it's won two major awards and was runner-up to a third -- but its sequel, KNUCKLE DOWN, and the collection, DEVILS YOU KNOW, have been somewhat neglected by yours truly in the advertising department. The bitterbrush truth of it is that I don't have the financial resources to promote all three books simultaneously. Releasing them in such close proximity was therefore probably a mistake, but as Ray Bradbury said, we build our wings on the way down. I'm still learning the process of marketing, even as I work my fingers to well-worn bone banging out more short stories, more novelettes, more novellas, and more novels.
One thing I have learned -- somewhat to my surprise -- is that a certain amount of social media crowing is necessary to drive sales. This is a surprise because when I dropped my first novel, I couldn't believe how little Facebook ads were worth in terms of actual units sold. Nearly every other marketing technique I tried was more effective that supposedly "vital" Facebook ads: in the end they seemed a total waste of money. And perhaps they still would be even if I were using them. A little trumpet fanfare on my own Facebook pages, however, plus a few mentions on Twitter and so forth, really drove sales of my last release, "Killing Time" -- my objective, to penetrate the top 100 Kindle sellers, was more than achieved when I briefly laid claim to the #17 slot.
Why am I mentioning this? Am I just humble-bragging my roundabout way to some distant point? No. I mention it because I have a new release to crow about, and while Goodreads is not social media, it is online, and has the benefit (unlike Facebook) of being composed entirely of people who actually like to read. So, to cases.
Today I released a novelette, "The Numbers Game," on Amazon. (For those of you unfamiliar with the term, a novelette is a story of 7,500 - 17,000 words -- longer than a short story but shorter than a novella.) The pedigree of this tale is worthy of a few lines in itself, but before I get to that, here is its description as it reads on Amazon:
The Battle of Britain rages. London is in flames, and civilization itself totters on the brink. Does Pilot Officer Maurice Mickelwhite care? Not one damn. He may be one of the better fighter pilots in the Royal Air Force, but it's not by choice. Maurice is a mathematical genius, who, if not for Hitler, would be happily teaching algebra and calculus at university. To hell with the war! Maurice just wants his numbers.
Trouble is...the numbers also want him."
As you can see, "The Numbers Game" is a war story. As I hope you can discern from that rather terse description, it is also a comedy...a very black comedy about the statistical probability of surviving one of the deadliest trades on earth: flying combat.
Like many of my stories, it has very deep roots indeed. When I was still basically a child, no more than twelve or so, I read about an incident which supposedly happened to the Red Baron, Manfred von Richtofen, in which some tactless shitwit told him that he had already outlived his mathematical chances for survival and was living on borrowed time. Perhaps not coincidentally, the seemingly invincible flying ace, the greatest of WW1, was killed in action not long afterward. This got me thinking (even at twelve) about the contrast between the cold, statistical numbers and the hot reality of human psychology. Cut to April of 2017. I am visiting London with my family, in part because my brother invited me, in part to celebrate the British magazine ZEALOT SCRIPT awarding me their "Book of the Year" award for 2016. Lying in my bed in Battersea...or maybe it was Clapham, I never did get that straight and I'm not sure the English have, either...I was working on a story when, as these things do, the idea for another story suddenly ignited within my brain. Being in London, and having just visited the underground command center Churchill used during the Battle of Britain, my thoughts had turned to the great air war which raged over Europe between 1939 - 1945. At the same time, encountering English accents everyday -- and Welsh, and Northern Irish, and a few Scots and a Geordie or two -- I was immediately reminded of one of my favorite authors, Derek Robinson, a prolific Briton who penned some of the greatest war novels ever written (if you haven't read Piece of Cake or War Story, you really ought to), and who understands the psychology of the fighter pilot better than any other writer I've ever read. Finally, I'd also just finished the great actor Michael Caine's autobiography. Caine, who was born Maurice Mickelwhite, grew up during The Blitz in WW2, and knows a lot about what it's like to look up at the sky and see it filled with fire.
Out of all of this, then, came "The Numbers Game." It is the story of a man whose passion is mathematics, but who ends up flying combat against what seem to be unending hordes of German aircraft. Day in, day out, for weeks, months, and eventually, years, Maurice straps himself in to 5,600 lbs of Hawker Hurricane and flies against the best pilots in Hitler's aerial army. Some days he gets the better of them, and some days, they get the better of his mates. But Maurice always seems to make it. Soon, he begins to wonder: just how long can he make it? What is the maximum life expectancy of a fighter pilot in wartime? Is it possible for him to calculate the day, the very hour he himself will go down in flames?
If you read my books or my short stories, or even this blog, you already know that human behavior obsesses me. Like Eddie Felson in The Color of Money, I consider myself "a student of human moves," a self-proclaimed expert on the human heart, and the reaction of more or less ordinary people to extreme stress has always been a source of fascination. For a fighter pilot flying combat on an almost daily, and in some cases a twice or thrice-daily, basis, the feeling that their last hour may be now is a constant experience. So too is the knowledge that death, when it comes, may not be swift and painless but instead fiery and terrible. When your squadron mates are getting killed left and right, sometimes literally in front of you, it's very hard to pretend you're immortal.
And what is the effect of all this stress, all this sudden and extreme terror, on the human mind, even a mind as disciplined and logical as Maurice Mickelwhite's? For the answer, at least my take on it anyway, you must read "The Numbers Game." But don't get annoyed at me. It's only 99 cents, and available instantaneously for download onto your Kindle, tablet, phone, or even your PC. And by this weekend, I hope to have a softcover version available for delivery via Amazon.
As I said at the beginning of this epistle, I work very hard at what I do: I just haven't been as prolific at publishing as I have at writing. Well, in
2019, I am endeavoring to share the fruit of these unseen labors with you.
Cheers.
Miles Watson
The Numbers Game
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