It took no effort at all to discover my dad’s big lie. Mom was confused, angry, violent… she had dementia. He kept this secret from his children for reasons I can’t comprehend. My wife, sister-in-law, and niece took care of her while dad recovered in a hospital. How they tolerated her nasty words and violent outbursts is nothing short of amazing.

My wife is an RN, and quickly realized my parents needed more help than we could provide, even after I left my job, so we moved them into an assisted living facility. Those places are expensive, like three times the cost of a mortgage on a good-sized single family home! We didn’t have a choice, and I assume others who experienced family dementia understand why they couldn’t keep living in their home without 24 hour monitoring.

When we cleaned out their house, I cataloged all the repairs it required, and there were a lot. I spent the next year and a half doing the best I could to get their house into shape for sale. During this time, last year in fact, my mother passed away from complications due to diabetes and dementia, leaving my dad alone in a facility that was only necessary because of mom.

Earlier this year I put dad’s home up for sale. To say I misjudged the housing market is an understatement. It didn’t sell, and now he’s out of money. I’m out of money as well. Next month, if it hasn’t sold, I’ll be moving him back into his house, but the repairs, and managing mom, has nearly bankrupted me. Luckily, my wife is still working.

I’d love to be a programmer or database person again, but I’m at an age where I’m no longer wanted in those fields. It won’t take much to right this ship. I just need to make a little per month to slowly reverse the financial damage this caused. I’m thinking… McDonald’s. We have a good history.

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Hmm… let’s think about this for a moment. The average reading time per capita (in America), per day, is 15 minutes, and this number is dropping every year. I will assume 5% of the US population reads, lol. This gives us about 17,000,000 readers, or 4,250,000 hours of reading per day. That sounds like a lot! If the average book takes 9 hours to read, we get around 470,000 books per day, or 170,000,000 books per year. Wow!

Now, just for fun, let’s say your readers all read the same books. That 170,000,000 books per year plummets to just 10 books per year, 17,000,000 times. Obviously, this is an extreme example so, to keep it interesting, let’s assume they read a few different ones and make that number 1,000,000 unique books per year.

How many new books come out every year in America? About 4,000,000, which means roughly 3,000,000 new books get zero or only a handful of eyes… oh. These numbers are completely fabricated. They’re probably much worse.

If a new author wants readers to try their book, they need them to not read someone else’s book. This is basic business. There simply isn’t enough readers for the glut of books saturating the market, a market that’s growing while the customer base is shrinking. You and all the other authors are competitors. The ones telling you otherwise, those are the smart business people hoping you’ll sit out the game.

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As a father of two boys, I watched it happen. My sons loved reading books, like the Harry Potter series. Then came the… distraction. Nope, not girls. Video games.

I can only speak as a man, for some men, so here it goes. Video games give men something they crave above all other things, a sense of competition. The power of gaming didn’t take over quickly, it took time and an innovation that transformed all sapient life on Earth. With the internet, men could play together as teams and fight to the virtual death with other men. Once online multiplayer games became ubiquitous, male readership numbers tanked, hard.

The men of our species want to compete with each other. It’s built into our DNA. It’s why we work overtime, play sports, associate with professional teams, or wave our nation’s flag. You can’t compete with other men when reading a book. Well, you can, but that’s weird.

How do we fix this? We can’t. It’s over for male readers. Yes there will always be a handful of us who read, but stories can’t compete with the excitement, camaraderie, and the subconscious sense of accomplishment video games provide. Barring some kind of catastrophic event that breaks the internet forever, male readership will never bounce back.

Here’s a bit of fun (read, horrible) news for authors. Women are getting into gaming more and more each year. Their reader numbers will fall as well. The only thing I can imagine bringing a few of them back is lowering the bar for reading. No, not making stories dumber. Make them shorter, like snacks. People love snacks.

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A lot of writers and authors pretend they write for themselves, then turn around and whine on social media about low sales. It’s basic business. To make money, you have to create the most popular product as cheep as you can, and push it out into the wild. Of course, there are always exceptions, but here’s a bit of cold truth, you are not the exception, and neither am I.

Decades ago I had an epiphany while watching an episode of American Idol. The show displayed a packed field of talented singers. This is when it became clear… no one is special now that we can see billions of people via television and the internet. A great singer in a rural farm town isn’t all that unique on the global stage. Singers are everywhere, and they’re all good, but none of them are particularly special. Again, there are outliers. Take Taylor Swift for example. She’s a great singer, but she has more than her voice. She crafted an entire business out of a persona that spoke to a wide audience of young women and girls. Pandering to her base, not her voice, made her a billionaire.

I will never be a famous author. Infamous? Maybe, but famous, never. It’s not that I’m unwilling to pander, I simply don’t know how.

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Rabbit Hole is a descriptive, imagination inspiring term used to describe most of what I waste time on every day. When I get a taste of new information, I jump feet first into the hole and follow every winding tunnel of knowledge. Those tunnels almost always have their own smaller tunnels, and I follow them as well. I can spend days, weeks, even months studying something as useful as human history, or as ridiculous as what’s the best font to use in a manuscript (It’s Garamond).

Here’s a little example of one rabbit hole I recently enjoyed. I wanted to write a scene where the United States military detonates a low yield nuclear weapon over a Texas desert in an attempt to kill a threat to the nations security. I spent nearly a week learning about nuclear fusion as it pertains to the detonation of fissile material inside a cruise missile. By the time I was done, I had two highly technical, very boring, pages written describing, in great detail, the journey of an atom as it’s squashed by an expanding a foam blanket.

Those pages were fun to write, but ended up in the trash folder. I removed them entirely because they didn’t make the story better. The Rabbit Hole rarely results in entertaining prose.

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Factotum [ fak-toh-tuhm ]
A person with an eclectic and diverse list of hobbies, activities, and responsibilities. In this case, a man with diagnosed, but unmedicated, ADHD and a storied history of rabbit hole researching until he knows just enough to pass as satisfactory.

I embody the consummate definition of “Jack of All Trades, Master of None”. Unable to focus on any one thing for an extended period of time, my chaotic brain juggles a myriad of disparate projects with all the skill and dexterity of a disturbingly jovial circus clown.

The Writer

I write books. They aren’t for everyone. The absolute best way to get to know me is by reading one, or all of them. If you do, keep in mind that my main characters are all different subsets of my personality. You can find links to my books and some descriptions here. Please review the content warnings if you’re the sensitive type, or a liberal, or a conservative, or religious, or atheist, or pagan… there’s something to offend everyone!

Hey men! Are there any male readers left? My books may be of particular interest to you, so you should give them a try. You might be surprised to find there are still a few authors who aren’t obsessed with pandering to the hate-all-men era of entertainment.

The Software Developer

There are a lot of programmers who write books. I wonder if anyone ever studied the reason behind this. I’ve been writing software for over 30 years. My software experience started with QBasic, then moved on to Visual Basic, VB.Net, Java, C#, and PHP. Microsoft C# is, by far, my favorite programming language, with PHP running a distant second. My real computer related obsession lies in database design, performance, and scalability. Check out my job history and follow the rabbit hole that has been my career for decades.

If you’re looking for a software developer or database administrator (contract of employee), I’m available for work nation wide, but focused on companies located within the Jacksonville and Saint Augustine areas.

The Hobbyist

This part of my life is a mess of unrelated things. I own a business, work on cars, tear down and rebuild kitchens and rooms, cook, and my latest weird dalliance… I’m trying to make Viking jewelry.

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Childhood

Adrian was born November 30th, 1968 in a small, at the time, town east of San Francisco, California. When he was six, his family fell on hard financial times and moved to suburban Minneapolis. While his father worked multiple jobs to keep his family fed, they hopped around the Twin Cities metropolitan area for the next twelve years. They never living in the same place for long.

Uprooted at every important stage of his early development, finding and keeping friends was difficult. During his middle school years, the world was on the cusp of a global technological revolution, the introduction of personal computers. Attracted to their limitless potential, Adrian taught himself to write computer code by dissecting existing games, rewriting them, and making them better…in his personal opinion. Developing software became his drug of choice, and that addiction persists to this day.

Adult Years

In the nineteen-nighties, he married his high school girlfriend, and they began their family soon after. Minnesota winters took their toll on him and his wife, so they followed his retired parents to Jacksonville Florida and settled down just south of the city. There, he vowed to let his children grow up without the distress of abandoning friends that made his young life so miserable.

Starting in his teens, he dabbled with writing on and off, but never applied any serious focus to it. Then, the COVID-19 pandemic shook our world, and changed everything. His once vibrant office culture assumed a morbid, lonely darkness. Businesses faltered. Nothing felt stable anymore. It was in this chaos he, like thousands of others, wrote a book.

Still a software developer today, but mostly in the field of database design and performance, Adrian is a published author, an aging father, a dog owner, and a resourceful jack of all trades.

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