Word count Volume 2:  10450

News:  Well, I sold some copies of Echo yesterday.  Special thanks to Melissa (Extra thank you here for the kind review on Amazon), Lorna, and the mystery reader from Australia, I swear I’ll protect your baby from being eaten by the dingo!  (Nyuk nyuk, I know I know-stupid.  That one’s for you, Renee).

Something I’ve realized about art/writing/creativity when I was on Twitter:  Just give of yourself, everything should turn into art.  What do I mean?  On twitter I started getting a barrage of writers basically saying this and only this:  “Hey! Here’s what I wrote, (insert genre), check it out!.”  And I was like: Wow, is this how I come off?  I don’t want my call to buy the book lost in an endless sea of identical sales pitches (actually I did hire booktweeper to do that for me, and I’ll let you know how that goes.  $8.99/month and supposedly they tweet to an established base of 300k readers about your book).

That’s when I realized:  Advertising is art, and I’m a writer.  Try to make each post something worth reading; a funny story, a thought, a stupid poem,  WHATEVER.  Just give, give, give, give of yourself, give of your art, and people will notice.  People will see and the effects will boomerang; the book will be bought (I hope).  So that’s the philosophy I’m operating under now.  Yes, I got booktweep on the job for me, but I’ve decided for myself: create everywhere, all the time.  In this way, something as mundane as advertising becomes another exercise in writing for me; it also makes me better with words.  Most importantly, it keeps that soul-cheapening feeling at bay when I ask people to buy my book.  Anyways, enough proselytizing.  To all you writers, I wish you inspired drafting and insightful editing!

Synopsis:  Echo is a sci-fi dystopian novel.  In the late 21st century, humanity left Earth due to multiple resource shortcomings aggravated by an acceleration in climate change.  They settled Echo, a planet that was nearly a carbon copy of Earth except for being devoid of life-with the exception of basic bacteria and plants.  Fast forward 1200 years later.  Echo has endured over a thousand years of dark age.  Corporations and government merged early on, becoming the oppressive authority known as the Regime.  Military and police merged into the Department of Enforcement, their only mission to crush the huge network of rebels known as the Dissidents.  Over half the planet is covered by decaying cityscapes and the elite live high above; removed and remote from the greater populace on the moon-city of Ascension.  Hope lies in one man, a bitter and crippled former Enforcer named Atriya.  But before he can break the cycle of darkness and ignorance on Echo, he has to do it within himself.