Most of the “Jack of All Trades” part of my personality comes from dad. He worked on cars, taught at a technical college, worked as a programmer, drove a taxi…the list goes on and on. Whenever the opportunity arose to help someone, friend or foe, he was there with his tools and a can-do attitude. There was nothing he wouldn’t try with all the confidence of a trained professional, but little of the skill.

Mom, however, was self-centered, anti-social, and convinced she was a modern Leonardo da Vinci. Her paintings, carvings, and statues were everywhere in our house. The problem with her was, if you didn’t drown her in praise, she assumed you hated her work, and her very existence. I don’t think she was completely sane.

Merged together, you get me, but with the third eye of seeing them as the world saw them. I’ll try to do anything, in secret. I don’t want people to see me fail, and unlike my mom, I assume everyone will see my stumbles while ignoring my successes.

I’m a good writer, programmer and database developer, but history has taught me to never assume I’m great at anything. I could be, but I don’t see it. This won’t stop me from trying my best, learning from each misstep, and getting better over time. I kind of have an obsessive personality.

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My musical tastes aren’t very diverse. The louder, angrier, and more foreign the music is, the better it is. My most listened to genre is German Industrial Metal. Some of my favorites, in order starting from most loved: Eisbrecher, Rammstein, OOMPH!, Megaherz, KMFDM… the list goes on and on. Why foreign? American music is polluted with well-crafted algorithms, making it appeal to the broadest group of paying customers. I’ve never fit in with large groups. Another reason for foreign music is that I don’t speak their language, so my brain doesn’t focus on the lyrics.

When I’m writing software, I need deafening music. There’s something about it that sets my fingers on fire, ripping over a keyboard, and churning out beautiful lines of code. There’s no better motivation than adrenaline (from music) and dangerous amounts of caffeine. I really miss the Dot-Com era.

Writing a book, now that’s a contrary beast. Music helps build scenes in my head like watching a movie with a heart pumping score, but I can’t write those scenes out with that distraction in my ears.

I assume this incongruity in seemingly similar tasks has something to do with logical processes versus creative ones. In my logic (coding) brain, music maintains or inspires my pace. In my creative brain, music channels my thoughts, restricting my imagination, and making writing difficult.

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Most of my efforts lately are centered around writing SEO friendly content for WordPress powered websites. I also create complex, database driven WordPress plugins that can do pretty much anything you want. My plugin PHP skills are insanely good and thorough, particularly so at my low hourly rate.

What’s my hourly rate? Well, it all depends on you. If you’re unrealistic and hyper-demanding, I’m going to be quite expensive. If you’re cool, I’m cheaper than most, if not all, of the highly skilled local developers you can find. No, I won’t compete dollar-for-dollar with Easter European, African, Chinese, or Indian developers. If you want to go cheap, that’s on you. Good luck. Fiverr is the place to look for that.

Unlike my foreign counterparts, I’ll meet with you, in person, at your office or a business of your choice (I really like coffee). I’ll even get with you to demonstrate updates on our ongoing project, if it’s a big one. Of course, this offer is only for businesses in the Jacksonville or Saint Augustine region of Northeastern Florida.

I’m competent in C#, PHP, and I can write Java, but it’s been a while. My T-SQL and overall database knowledge is legendary (in my own mind). Check out my career history for more information.

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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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I live without fear of consequences when it pertains to my career or hobby decisions. You want me to build a shed from reclaimed driftwood? Sure, I can do that… probably. I’ve never done it before, but I’m certain I’ll figure it out along the way.

No, I’m not a psychopath, at least no professionals have ever labeled me as such. I don’t wish ill or harm on anyone, but I don’t fret over their self-inflicted suffering either, and my definition of self-inflicted is extremely broad.

This is where make-believe comes into play. At some point during my midlife crisis, I stopped seeing events as ruling my life. Everything became a story, like a book, television show, or movie. Each situation compartmentalized into its own silo, a silo I could just walk away from and forget about while I visited another silo. There are a lot of disparate silos in my head.

Basically, every aspect of my life exists independently of the others. My make-believe multiverse of reality is a catalog of shows that I choose to live inside until I get bored or frustrated and move on to the next show.

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Everything I write has a sturdy foot planted in the remorseless lottery of natural selection. You may think you’re a nature lover, but when you point at a pretty flower, my brain wonders how many iterations of that flower had to parish before this one proved itself worthy to continue living in our hostile world. I love nature on an entirely different level than most people. The apathetic code that lies within the heart of every living thing on Earth fascinates me.

My book series, Ascension, embraces this fascination. It’s about a universe of Gods who despise mental and physical weakness in the sapient creatures of our anthropic universe. How did I come of with this god-awful concept? It came to me in a daydream while I wandered around Saint Augustine Florida on my lunch break. I like to think these Gods are real, and my writing is them using me as a tool to communicate with the human species.

The more you get to know the writer version of me, the more you’ll see that I’m broken by current Western Civilization standards. I don’t believe every live has intrinsic or even equal value. I don’t see empathy as a strength. If you spend enough time talking to me, you’ll realize, deep down, you are more like me than you’ll want to admit.

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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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WIP is a standard acronym used by authors and artists to indicate a book, or work or art, is an ongoing project. It stands for Work in Progress, or Work in Process. It’s usually presented as a hashtag on social media sites (#WIP).

Me and my WIP(s)

Occasionally, I’ll post inane, rambling walls of text while working through any challenging issues or plot holes I encounter in my WIP(s). Screen barfing helps clear my brain, allowing it to realign and focus on what’s important.

Another issue that stalls progress on my WIP(s) is, rabbit hole research. I can burn days studying every minute detail of something. All that knowledge gathering has a habit of resulting in only a paragraph or two, or nothing at all.

You can check out my books page for a list of ongoing writing projects.

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