Rhino Puzzlings

 Both the ebooks of  The Fall and Rise of @TheRealJoyG  and  Trouble  are discounted exclusively at Smashwords this month, along with many other deals from many other indie authors. Amazon isn't picking this up, it's solely through this one vendor. Load up your reader or phone while the getting's good! 🧩🦏 

It began with an old man, mean books, and a giant bird. I'm still discovering the rest. My youngest child gifted me with a pack of Narata storytelling cards some years ago, which are one of many prompt-generating products out there. I used them to come up with the core ideas behind my current WIP, and from that seed, a strange and twisted tree grew... and that's cool, because I'm a fan of strange and twisted. And funny. As I mentioned in the previous post , Big Serious Work often gives way to Leavened With Humor. I'm not able to fight it, so I have learned to embrace it. What I'm also learning is the act of enlargement, growth, expansion... how to take that man/books/bird core idea and write out a narrative that is interesting, doesn't explain too much, but also doesn't hide too much, if that makes any sense. Writing that delights me is a magic trick, a diverting of expectations and attention with flourishes and misdirections that still results in delight. ...

Oh, the first draft. So many events in publishing test an author's soul, but none as brutal as staring at the face of a first draft. Someone collected a set of quotes, possible apocryphal, on Reddit recently, and they are universal in their apologetic, just-stick-it-out tone of the first draft. I'm wrestling with my own right now, flailing around in the weeds to try to shape the vision I hold in my head to approximate words on the page. Someone took mild issue with the collection, and suggested that "Just [write] a solid, good, first draft" was the solution. I took mild issue with that advice, because Reddit: "Just" is doing a lot of lifting in that sentence. As is "solid." And, for that matter, "good." Write a saggy, floppy, rambling, get-it-down first draft, shelve it for a month, and then come at it sideways with a red pen and a suit of armor is more my style. I can't shape the small until I've completed th...

I'm not sure when the rebrand took place, probably in the lean decade and a half between my own publishing attempts, but "self-published" became "indie publishing" (and "vanity presses" often became "hybrid.") No matter the branding, it's living DIY mindset and aesthetic and knowing and avoiding pitfalls. In 2012, when I first tried, the book landscape was very different. Amazon was still dominant, of course, but Barnes & Noble was a competitor, and truly indie distribution options were limited. It's been a while, but I think I chose B&N and Smashwords for an eBook, and CreateSpace for the print editions. I remember being of the "anything but Amazon" mindset, which now feels quaintly progressive. They were always the 500 pound gorilla in the middle of the living room, but it was easier to pretend to ignore them. Here in 2026, Amazon has swept up CreateSpace, Draft2Digital long-since absorbed Smashwords, and Barnes an...