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The main problem in Oklahoma has less to do with the wind and more to do with the wind ferrets that come with it. They’re a serious problem.
Like, we all want to give the indigenous species room to exist and do their thing, but the ecological ramifications of having wind ferrets in your state is something the local government has really struggled with. They are very hard on crops, they deplete vast quantities of liquid resources, and they smell bad.
Arkansas recently outlawed them (or, rather, made it legal to bite them until they die, which has effectively solved the problem) and there’s not enough wind in Texas or Kansas to support them except in singular units, which take much less effort to control. A single wind ferret can be tolerated, but in Oklahoma, we get wind speeds of 30-50 mph regularly, which is more than enough to support flocks of 70-80 wind ferrets.
I saw such a flock attack a Volkswagen Beetle once.
Oklahoma economy is almost entirely based around the oilfield, which is dangerous due to the boom/bust nature of the industry. Right now we have extreme unemployment issues because of such a bust, and it really takes a toll on every business in the area.
Busts in the oilfield happen when the wind ferrets’ acidic pee gets all over the oil rigs, causing significant structural issues that make drilling either very dangerous or impossible. Most employees go through some level of tennis-racket-based combat training to defend the rigs, but again, at high wind speeds, larger flocks are able to hold together and there’s very little that can be done on an individual level. One oil venture this past October invested in a fire machine to be used in such cases, and I’m gonna be honest, watching the night skies lit up by flaming wind ferret flocks and the spurts of flammable gases into the air was kinda beautiful. It’s gotta be similar to what folk back during the civil war felt watching canon fire in the distance from their windows.
All the oilfielders died that night.
So, yeah, anyway, kinda a long rant, but that’s Oklahoma in a nutshell. Pretty cool state.
Yeah, I liked For the Temple too. Beric the Britain was pretty good as well, those are the two I really remember.
Not to say I don’t like his stuff; I’ve really enjoyed a number of his writing. It’s just that the more I read, the more patterns I see, and the less enjoyable it is over time.
Yeh . . . but all Henty books follow a very specific plot pattern with very similar characters who generally don’t have archs, and the key to any battle fought in any one of his books is DON’T BREAK FORMATION, and there are no ifs, ands, or buts about it.
Any marketing these days has almost got to be as creative as the book itself. The more formulaic the marketing, the less impact it seems to have, at least in my experience.
This also has to be paired with low expectations. Self-published books very rarely make lots of money, so you can’t quit your day job. And that’s okay, especially at this early stage, and with how cheap it is to self-publish these days. I read a statistic from 2006 that said that the average self-published book sells 500 copies; I don’t know what today’s statistic is.
But for marketing, you might want to either play directly to whatever audience you have already, or go crazy and try to gather an audience based on the artistic, creative merit of your marketing. The latter is something I’m really wanting to experiment with, because I think it holds the most promise. You want to determine what type of people read the type of stuff you’re writing, and then aim your marketing SPECIFICALLY to them. It’s not about dragging the non-fiction-reading 50 year olds to your Pirate Adventure, but about getting your story to the people who love Pirates Adventures.
At least, that’s how I understand it based on my current studies. Marketing is a fickle thing; it’s hard to nail down any real rules for it.
No no no, you missed it, stay with me here a second!
You laughed.
You, just you.
Somewhere in the vast scheme of things, as God formed you in your Mother’s womb, and saw everything you would be and mean and say and do, he gave you the potential to find joy in a picture of kittens wearing bonnets.
Isn’t that amazing?
Isn’t it amazing that God actually cared that much about something that small? You didn’t laugh at the picture because you’re a fallen creature, fighting against the sin in your bones. Even though we’ve been trying all this time to wrap our minds around the deep moral dilemmas behind this complex, stirring issue . . . all that stopped for something like 3 seconds, and someone experienced joy. And it happened because you were designed by a creator, and that made the checklist.
I’ve heard people say, and I’ve said it before too, that if my work changes the life of ONE person for the better, then I’m content. But I’m never fleshed out the context of that. So maybe I should say something different. If my work changes the life of one person for the better, but offends the rest of the world, Christian and non-Christian alike, then I’m content.
Cause maybe that Amish Vampires in Space novel caught the eye of the girl perusing the paranormal romance section who got ostracized by church kids for reading Harry Potter.
Maybe that Christian zombie movie grabbed the attention of the horror buff over in the corner looking for a movie for his buddies and him on Halloween.
Or maybe a joke I make lifts the chin of someone fighting depression, at least just for an instant.
You know what I gathered from Kerry when I talked to him about his choice to use Vampires? He used to watch old monster movies with his family. He grew up with this type of stuff. And he loves it, because it’s fun. Not evil; there’s no direct Biblical evidence that vampires and zombies are evil concepts that should be abstained from. So he wrote a story, taking a crazy title, fun from his childhood, and a passion for God, and mixed it together into what we have been debated, yet not reading: Amish Vampires in Space.
@Rosey: BUT IT MADE YOU LAUGH! Did you see that? Did you see it? IT CAUSED LAUGHTER! The God of the universe created the smallest elements that make up the flesh of an amoeba and the largest gargantuan balls of nuclear fire in the cosmos but he stopped for a moment and decided that laughter would be a good thing.
That’s a spiritually enriching thought, isn’t it?
Miss Emma, I have spent a great deal of time doing things for the grander purpose, and a great deal of time doing things for fun. You would not believe how often the two intertwined, and even turned out to serve the opposite purpose more entirely than they did the original.
Now I may know something is wrong, and do it, and then I have done wrong. But I may see that my peers think something is wrong, and do it, but have not done wrong, because wrong is not based on the whims of man, but on a 2,000 year old (last divine revision date) book that has entirely left open the floodgates of possibility for what we can and cannot write. God himself put creatures on this earth far more terrifying than vampires and zombies. He made us. Mortals in the image of the God. We were good, and then we were not.
I suppose man is like a zombie in that way, isn’t he? Walking about on this earth, living on the outside but dead on the inside. When you think about it, Jesus came to cure the zombies.
^That’s MY novel idea, dibs dibs dibs, no stealing. XD
^with Kittens.
Do kittens make it better?
It’s less gross and more adorable with kittens.
Okay. So it’s our heart that matters.
So if you true heart attitude is like, “I totes my goats wanna write a great Christian story but I wants to do it in space with vampires and Amish people and stuff”, then we’re all chill?
