isotretinoin buy online no prescription I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by. — Douglas Adams
Douglas Adams may have been the funniest writer who has ever lived. If you haven’t read his famous series that begins with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, you really should. The “trilogy” of four books aren’t merely funny — they are absolutely laugh out loud hilarious.
If you’ve never seen the humor possibilities of science fiction, you can’t have read anything by Douglas Adams before. Frankly, I don’t know if Guardians of the Galaxy would have even been conceivable, if Adams had not shown many years ago that humor and science fiction actually work very well together.
And a galaxy without Groot simply wouldn’t be the same…
I can certainly empathize with Adams on the subject of deadlines. Theoretically, we should be editing my novel that follows Premonition right now, but I’ve managed to postpone completing the first draft for at least another month.
It’s not that I refuse to work — I just have a bad habit of procrastinating when it comes to producing work that might produce income. Obviously, I waste too much time writing about things that interest me, rather than things that might potentially pay for me to write about them.
Like this article, for example…unless you happen to navigate over to my “Books” page and find something you’d like to read or click on the book cover above, this effort will never amount to anything more than a labor of love: today, my love for Douglas Adams.
I adamantly refuse to have my web designer add a “Donate” button to create a small income stream — that feels like begging for money to me. My thinking is, if you like my writing and want to support my work, you should buy a book. Heck, even writing this article feels like begging.
Oh, what the hell…I’m going to throw caution into the wind, and go for broke. If you buy one of my books and enjoy reading it, please consider posting a short review online to share your opinion.
Fair and honest reviews are extremely useful to other readers looking to discover new authors on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or Smashwords, and they are as valuable as gold to an author.
If I ever hope to emulate the success of Douglas Adams, I’m going to eventually have to figure out the whole marketing thing…a course that unfortunately I didn’t pay much attention to when I attended business school many years ago.
In his novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, Adams describes something called the Ravenous BugBlatter Beast of Traal as the most ferocious creature in the universe, but one so mind-bogglingly stupid that the best defense against it was to simply cover your head with a towel. According to Adams, this beast was so unbelievably dumb it thought if you couldn’t see it, then it also couldn’t see you. Now that’s comedy.
Honesty compels me to admit that I used to find those paragraphs in the book that pertain to the BugBlatter much funnier than I do today.
This happened because when my son was only a couple of years old, he wanted to sleep in his sister’s room. One night he was especially persistent. Several times I caught him playing in her room past his bedtime and promptly sent him back to bed. Finally I saw him standing in the doorway of his bedroom, ready to make another mad dash across the hall…but before I could send him back to his own bed, he pressed his hands over his eyes so that he couldn’t see me, and ran for her room.
I began to laugh out loud…and then it occurred to me that my son apparently thought I was just as stupid as the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal.
That realization humbled me. From that day forward, the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal no longer amuses me as much as it once did.
As a writer, I consider it to be part of my job to promote truly great writers and philosophers both past and present, as I try to learn how to promote myself. People have told me they enjoy reading my books. Most of my reviews have been fantastic. Three of my books have even won awards…but my family couldn’t even support our dogs on my current income from book sales. Obviously, I need to work on a marketing concept known as “increasing volume” until I have solved that mystery.
So, my experiment for the foreseeable future will be to see if blogging more frequently, perhaps with less verbose posts, might attract more people to my website and create new customers for my books.
The world needs great writers. We need more good writers, too. And writers need to earn a living.
Admittedly, we seem to have a plethora of mediocre, and more than enough bad writers and books that aren’t worth reading already.
I’m writing all this in the hope you’ll eventually buy one of my books, and that you’ll like what you read.
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