Sunday, October 20, 2013

A Simple Blueprint

I regret that I have not had the time as of late to devote to this blog. I plan on setting aside a scheduled time during my day off to rededicate myself to this endeavor. Today I depart from movie reviews and top five lists to impart a few things I have learned along the long arduous road of the publishing process.

My name may not be synonymous with "best seller" or "successful full time author" but I remain hopeful this shall come to fruition in some near future. My confidence is fueled by some of the reviews I have received within the last couple of years since my Morian Trilogy has been released. I discount any comments provided by those I am acquainted with. Though they are appreciated, I find  these individuals tend to give lip service and convey what they think I want to hear.

The commentary I value most are those who have never met me nor have heard my name before taking a chance on purchasing and reading my work. I find these testimonies untainted by biases and most enlightening.  Here is an anonymous entry on Barnes and Noble about book one of the Morian Trilogy:

"Whether you are an Isaac Asimov or L. Ron Hubbard fan, MoriaVaratu by David Lee Jones is destined to be the next Classic Novel in the SciFi gendre. Check out this compelling and enthralling story by South Carolina author David Lee Jones."

Here is one from Amazon.com from Glenn Giznad"

"Have you ever read a book and the action plays like a movie inside your head as you proceed? That is the way this book reads. Not only do you become personally connected with the characters (both human and alien), but the twists and turns of the storyline will keep you from wanting to put the book down. There are so many variables in this Martian/human saga that you just can't wait to discover what happens next. I highly recommend reading the first book in this trilogy, Moriavaratu, and once you become hooked, you will not want to stop once you get to this one. The third and final chapter in this epic story is on its way and it can't get here anytime too soon for those who are endeared to this chronicle."

I will refrain from any more propaganda, but more reviews of my work can be found on Barnes and Noble, Amazon.com, iTunes and Lulu.com. If interested all one has to do is search David Lee Jones on these sites.

In closing I would give aspiring writers the following advice:
1. Never give up, never surrender! Thanks Galaxy Quest. The publishing process is saturated with rejection. The most important thing to remember... there is someone out there who will eventually dig what you are shoveling. You just have to have the determination and constitution to keep shoveling.


2. Goose the reader every page! I make every chapter a mini cliff hanger so the reader can't stop at just one page or a single chapter.

3. Reread everything! I like to give it a week and revisit my work. Reason is, especially when the creative juices begin to pour, your dictation of thought may outpace your fingers. I find when I come back to a page there are missing words and screwed up concepts I need to revise to make any sense of my dialogue.

4. Screenplay it! Convey every page as if it were a scene in a movie. Use plenty of dialogue to move the story along. Readers won't deal with bland for long, keep them on their toes with plenty of heart pounding action and twists and turns within your plot.

5. Social Beat it to death! Use any type of media you can think of to get your name out there. I have close to 5,000 likes on my authors page on Facebook. I try to tweet any spare time I have and LinkedIn is not a bad place to network either. Sometimes I feel I am a broken record, but it does tend to get people talking about ya.

I got my start on My Writers Circle. Here you can find plenty of like minded individuals with tons of great advice. Also, another great resource is AuthorsDB. This site is a worthy endeavor to give aspiring writers a vehicle to promote their work.

In closing I will say, this is just a blueprint on how I got published and how I got my name out there. It may not work for everyone, but it is a place to start. And, I am just getting started. If this gives you a head start, then I am glad I could help. If not... there are plenty of resources out there to point you in a direction. Whether its the right direction... just be careful... there are a lot of sharks in the water.

Thanks for stopping by...




Wednesday, October 9, 2013

Angels of the Oasis

Tonight's Blog is a revisit to the past (6/11/13)

As I sit behind my laptop this evening contemplating a new blog post, I have been victimized. Life has encroached upon my muse and I find myself being pulled away from task to go study for a pass/fail week of training for AT&T. Alas, there is no fun movie quote games or Fav Five lists this evening.

But this is the struggle for the starving self-published author of the modern age whose budget for life's demands leaves little left over to push our wares. The grind constantly robs from promotion time and funds. But, do not lose faith my weather beaten and trodden down brethren of the pen, there are Angels amongst the chaos of the social matrix network.

Upon wading into the tidal pools of twitterland last week I stumbled upon an Oasis in the form of a site apply named "Authorsdb.com." These folks have made it their mission to give the worthy writer a vehicle to promote our hard work.

The following is quoted from their site:
"Here at AUTHORSdB we've formed the only database of authors, including social media, book listings and much more, for today's mind-field of thousands of aspiring and established writers.  We are a dedicated website that helps authors for free.  Why free? We have a few Angels who simply want to see authors flourish.  Readers no longer have to google from several different websites to find out more about a particular author – it’s all here."

So, fellow manipulators of the manuscript, waste no more time trudging through the barren wastelands of the social sites of twitter and facebook and go submit your listings to a social site of your own peers. I guarantee the effort will earn much more mileage on AdB than on the previous before mentioned entities.

And, while you're there, be sure to rate the book cover images of David Lee Jones under the Science Fiction category within the AdB Book Cover Contest.

Wednesday, October 2, 2013

Modern Era Fortune Tellers

Today is a revisit to a post from May 9th.

When growing up I lost myself in the great works of the Science Fiction masters. Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C Clark and H.G. Wells were some of my favorites. I would thrust the limits of alertness of my ravenous adolescent mind into the wee hours of every summer morning devouring the futuristic imagery these masters painted upon the canvas of my imagination.


I remember how excited I became when I read in Bradbury’s Farenheit 451, “And in her ears the little Seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk coming in, coming in on the shore of her unsleeping mind.” As the words played across the page before my weary and blurry eyes my brain pictured a Walkman, the same make and model of the one that lay beside me, as I read by dim night table lamplight. My tired brain did not make the connection until much later that this man had predicted the invention of my little hand held radio in 1953 over a quarter of a century before the first model was ever assembled. Within the same work Bradbury envisioned the death of newspapers and the ubiquitous presence of television screens everywhere, all of which is taking place in our modern day society.

That was the night my twelve year old mind formed the epiphany; Science Fiction writers are the fortune tellers of our age. I read Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon the summer after and I was captivated at the precise predictions he made about the first Apollo Moon Mission over a century before the first rocket launched from Cape Canaveral. This Science Fiction prophet predicted the United States would launch a ship made of mostly aluminum from the Florida Peninsula carrying three spacemen into orbit. This book was published in 1865. He correctly envisioned the feeling of weightlessness these men would feel after escaping our planets gravity. He then went on to predict their capsule splashed down into the Pacific Ocean where it was recovered by a U.S. Navy vessel. Kinda eerie is it not?

In 1914 H.G. Well's  book Set the World on Fire accurately prophesized nuclear weapons. The author knew a little about radioactive decay but had no idea man would figure out how to blow it all up at once. In this novel he actually coined the term "atomic bomb" decades before the first uranium bomb was tested. He also imagined the aftermath of a detonation in this following passage: "In the map of nearly every country of the world three or four or more red circles, a score of miles in diameter, mark the position of the dying atomic bombs and the death areas that men have been forced to abandon around them. Within these areas perished museums, cathedrals, palaces, libraries, galleries of masterpieces and a vast accumulation of human achievement, whose charred remains lie buried, a legacy of curious material that only future generations may hope to examine."

We all know the modern notion of Star Trek predicting the cellular phone. Pretty impressive yes, but, did you know that Mark Twain predicted the internet in 1898? His Adventures of Huck Fin and Tom Sawyer over-shadowed his dabbling in Science Fiction, but, in a short story titled From the London Times of 1904 Twain wrote about a device he called a Telelectrosope, “…the daily doings of the globe made visible to everybody, and audibly discussable too, by witnesses separated by any number of leagues." Another passage within the same short story read, “Day by day, and night by night, he called up one corner of the globe after another, and looked upon its life, and studied its strange sights, and spoke with its people…” Sounds a lot like social networking to this modern day ear.



In my own Science Fiction Trilogy (got my own plug in), The Morian Trilogy, I predict in 300 years in the future that human beings will have an INPUT (Individual Personal Uplink Terminal) implanted behind their left eye. It is "tuned in" to their brain wave frequency and gives them access to a Planetary Database called Mother Earth. The device projects an image screen before his or hers eyes only visible to the user. In this future world we use this interface for everything; watching movies, calling a friend, checking the news.

What do y’all think? These are just a few examples from my childhood reading and my own writings. I would love to hear of any predictions you folks have encountered over the years of reading Science Fiction.