Guest Post by Martin King

I am happy to participate in the 100blogfest tour! Return with us now to those Golden Days of Yesteryear, where you had to be the First Kid On Your Block to have the latest TV toys. The following is by Martin King:

I remember so many great TV programs when I was a kid. The likes of
Star Trek everyone remembers because its longevity. But what about
some of the others? But more importantly back then, it wasn’t all
about the TV program and how good it was for the audience, but it was
all about the toys.

I remember owning a SS Enterprise ship that you could press a button
and it fired round discs. Then there was a sci-fi show, now I think
I’ve got it right, called UFO. They had these space ships that looked
like a sort of helicopter, but instead of having two runners, they had
a third one at the front.

They also had a huge torpedo missile at the front and you pressed a
button to fire it. I had one of them that I swapped some rubbish car
with this kid for. What an easy swap. But that was the best thing
about sci-fi toys, they always seem to have extra working gadgets on
them compared to most other toys.

I could talk about so many great programmes and toys, but my all time
favourite had to be Space 1999. I loved that show, but better still
were the Eagles. And I had a full set of them. They had to be the best
toy ever.

You could disconnect it’s undercarriage and fly the ship off
separately. But also there was this one type I had that had these
toxic barrels on with magnets on the top. A winch and rope was
connected to the craft and you could lower it down and pick up the
barrels, amazing stuff.

Just as a side point, I remember there was a recall or something
because the little plastic barrels had paper wrapped around them with
toxic symbols. Apparently the paint they had used was toxic. My mate
sent his back and got a replacement – plain boring plastic barrels. I
kept mine, they looked better!!!

These blogs are all about fun and sharing. Thank you for reading a
‘#100blogfest’ blog. Please follow this link to find the next blog in
the series: http://martinkingauthor.com/blog/7094550076

Back in the day. . .

When I was a lad back in the 1950's, I often dreamed of flying to the stars. That dream was bolstered by watching every type of sci-fi movie that I could find. Some of my favorites? Forbidden Planet, War Of The Worlds, This Island Earth, Earth vs The Flying Saucers, Gog, Invaders From Mars, Angry Red Planet. . . the list is quite long.

Around the time of my eighth birthday, I got a library card and every Tuesday I would run down the street to the waiting Bookmobile to get my alloted armful of books. I was into Asimov, Heinlein, Bradbury, Knutter, and the like and would devour books like they were Necco Wafers.

So the twig is bent, so grows the tree. Fifty plus years later, I still read a lot of books. Science Fiction, Legal Drama, Murder Mysteries, High-Tech Thrillers, Spy Novels, Military Adventures, Police Procedurals, you name it. My reading list is also speckled with a good assortment of hard science and physics books from Stephen Hawking, Brian Greene and others.

Yesterday marked the 42nd anniversary of the historic first Moon landing. Today marked the end of the NASA Space Shuttle flights. My whole life has been spent wondering about the origins of life, the nature of the universe and now I have the gratifying knowledge that I was around to see Man's first feeble attempts to leave the planet of his birth and reach out into the void.

Instantly, after deciding to write a series of space opera novels, I looked toward Orion, my favorite constellation. Easily discernable in this photo is Bernard's Loop, a 300 lightyear-wide bubble of expanding gas thought to be the remnant of a massive multi-stellar explosion some 2 million years ago. This area of space is the background of my stories and, just as always, I'm certain that once Man actually explores this region of the Milky Way, the truths found there will easily outstrip the fantasies. Nature is more creative than we give Her credit for.

What I Do When I'm Writing

My creative environment is important; my "office" or "man cave" is important. I surround myself with the necessary tools I need when writing: the computer (of course), printer, reference books, and lots of music. My creative space is surrounded by CDs and usually I put on a mix of music to write by.

Some of my favorites? Old-school jazz (Grover Washington, Jr., Gato Barbieri, Peter White, David Sanborn and the like); old-school R&B (Marvin Gaye, The Miracles, The Impressions, Eddie Kendricks, The Temptations, etc.); space music (Star Wars, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Trek, Alien, ET, etc.); and miscellaneous moving music to keep me interested in what I'm doing (James Bond themes, soundtracks, etc.).

My favorite music to write by: Enigma. Hands down. I find that the thumping rhythms and chants are often reminiscent of space-opera themes and sometimes, not conciously, I find myself writing to a tempo, a back-beat on the keyboard, a soaring melody that often corresponds to the action I'm depicting. My full-immersion mode is complete with noise-canceling headphones to keep my mind on the task at hand.

Needless to say, I'm sort of compulsive when it comes to the tunes. I have a few (ha!) to choose from and on any given day, writing or drawing, the back-beat is present in the cave.

The first part of "The Belt Loop" is finished, 5 more parts to go.

How Long Are You Gonna Write?

I had a friend recently ask me, "How long are you gonna write this stuff?"

I told him, "Until they tell me to stop."

And therein lies the rub. I am persistent, I am tenacious whenever I get hold of something new that I like. I've done it before. Maybe some of that obsessive/compulsive character flaw oozing out into my Kindle efforts. The point is, with the platform being very easy to master, the results being very easy to evaluate in real-time, and the efforts being so easy to accomplish, why not write forever?

It's a legacy thing. Whatever I do today will have an impact on what I do tomorrow; after I'm gone, the imprint lives on. Often I have been told, "You should write a book" and now I am writing books. Some of those same people now have to be chained and dragged to the well of reading, have to be coerced with free copies, have to be led by the hand to pick up a book. I had it easy. I was reading by the time I was 4 years old and have never stopped. In today's world, it is hard to find many avid readers since most prefer to get their news, movies, and other entertainment from the cable machine. How sad. There are so many worlds out there to explore, so many things that only need to be looked at and marveled at. I usually look at the Astronony Picture Of the Day (APOD) to get myself in the mood to write. And, yes, like the universe, I plan to do it forever.

Spiral Day At Galaxy, Inc. (c) 1991 R. Jones. Like this imaginative galaxy factory that cranks out spirals on Tuesdays, I plan to crank out another novel this year.

Traction for the Book

"I can't get no. . . eBook traction. . ."

Like the old song goes, I've tried and I've tried.

So what are the major stumbling blocks when it comes to getting noticed in the eBook world? With hundreds of thousands of eBook pubs out there, how does an indie publisher get noticed? The $64,000 dollar question. Yes, I have a blog. Yes, I have a page on both authorcentral, amazon, and publishedauthors.net. Is it enough? I'm really not sure.

Is my price point too high? I'm not sure. I started the eBook at $9.99 and held it there for 5 weeks. Then I lowered it to $3.99. Still, not a significant number of sales, even after racking up a couple of great reviews. The next stop on this journey, maybe in about 60 days will be the bottom. Ninety-nine cents.

But, I have done this kind of thing before. As an artist. The prints I have done of my work usually start out around $35 and slowly over time drop and drop. The tail-end of the runs are usually just given away to fans and family. But, that's probably because I choose to publish them independently. In the eBook world, indie authors are pretty much required to do the same thing, until one develops a strong enough following to support the ungodly sum of $9.99.

Then why do we do it? Is the story so important to tell that we will practically give it away? Maybe. My two novels are long. The first one was 158,000+ words. The second one 153,000. It takes time to do this, it takes patience to do this, it takes perserverance to do this. My approach is not to make money. My approach is not to be famous. I have had both at one time or another in my life. My approach is to share thoughts and experiences with people that I would not ordinarily have the pleasure of knowing otherwise.

That is why getting traction is important. That is why we do it, that is why we carry on.

Let the creative juices flow, even though sometimes the pressure relief valve is stuck. "Zero Gee Plumbing" by R. Jones (c) 2007.

Tomorrow: How Long Are You Gonna Keep Writing?

Inspiration and Attitude

Sometimes I must ask myself, why are you doing this? Why branch out, why bifurcate your efforts at this stage of your life?

Maybe it's because I have attitude. Don't get me wrong, my attitude is grounded in the fact that my time devoted to creative pursuits are precious, and with the time I have left to create, I must devote the proper amount of attention to my goals.

I have unfinished manuscripts in my desk; I have unfinished drawings in my portfolio. My art takes an enormous amount of time. These are not photo-shopped images, these are pictures delivered on paper with a technical drawing pen, one line or dot at a time. I have one picture that took me 27 years to complete!

I take the same "quit talking about it and get it done" attitude to my writing endeavors. Keep at it until it's done, don't quit. In the grand scheme of things, this all seems to fit my mindset. And, just as I do with the art, I try to be as detailed as possible in my writings. I hope it shows.

This image "One Universe, Some Assembly Required" mirrors my approach to writing. The book is there, the pieces are there, all I have to do is tinker them together with a sustainable plot and well-defined characters. Easy, right?

Tomorrow: Getting Traction