NEWFANGLED DEATH released!

NEWFANGLED DEATH now available in eBook ($2.99 USD) and print ($6.99 USD)! Please visit the newly opened www.derekachoy.com to see your buying options and read an excerpt!

Description: A volume of sad/strange/silly stories featuring weirdos and sweethearts, immobile birds and neglectful planets, all flavoured with a loving dash of death.

Post Mortem!

After copies of the print version of Newfangled Death arrive for me to approve, we're ready to go! Ideally this will be 1-2 weeks and there will be no glaring errors that stealth bomb me.

The final page count is 54. Here's the description from the back cover:

Sad/strange/silly stories featuring weirdos and sweethearts, immobile birds and neglectful planets, all flavoured with a loving dash of death.

The eBook version will be available for $2.99 at Amazon.com (Kindle MOBI) and Smashwords.com (ePUB, Kindle MOBI, and PDF). Eventually it will spread to other stores like iBooks and Kobo as well.

Physical copies will be available for $6.99 at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk (and other Euro Amazons) and Lulu.com. Sadly, I'm not able to list on Amazon.ca for fellow Canadians, but Lulu ships from Ontario if you live here at least.

I went crazy several times during the writing of this project! I'm glad I'm pursuing one of the few professions where lack of sanity is a prerequisite, however.

Next up, work has already begun on a volume of poetry! I think I've warned you already, but it won't be very meter/rhyme-heavy as I've stuck to in the past. You'll get ample free samples from this one though, to see if it's to your tastes. More details as I write!

See you, space cowboy

I can't help big brain-smiles of glee when I see the pictures coming in from Curiosity, the NASA rover that landed on Mars this month. Space always has a way of melting me into doe-eyed wonder, and to see these shots, to know that this is what you would see if you were standing on Mars makes my head blow up BIG BANG STYLE.

I don't care if it's a hunk of red dirt. It's another world that we're seeing like never before.

And think of how much more there is to see out there! What do the Earth-sized storms on Jupiter look like? When do we get a good sight of a black hole? (Or what's around it anyway). How about the unfurling edges of the universe?!

Obviously I'm not expecting any quick answers there, but this stuff has been infecting my dreams since I was a kid, and I'm ecstatic to see even the smallest scrap of it for real.

Patience, my eyeballs—someday I will launch you out there too!

Dummy

Sometimes I wish that for every work I produced, I were a new person. Some fresh crash test dummy who never has to worry about what comes after his job's done. No precedents to set. No expectations to meet. Just a fresh, disposable body that no one even needs to know.

It's a little silly. I'm a nobody as it is! But even still, there's always a desire to distance myself from what I've done already. It doesn't matter if I liked it, or if I made it yesterday or years ago. I don't want to be trapped in the same car, crashing into the same wall, flying out the same windshield, no matter how good I've become at it.

That's probably why I've always been drawn to starting new projects. But lately I've been wondering how much of that is a desire for novelty and how much is just plain running away. Would I ever be able to devote myself to, say, poetry, for more than a few years? Being completely honest, that's what I want to do the most. I know I wouldn't have to do it exclusively, but I wonder if I'm capable of a true, long-term focus regardless.

Suppose we'll find out soon enough. Maybe I just need to crash the same car till the wall breaks.

That empty, follow feeling inside

Hey! Facebook page! Twitter feed! Probably two avenues to the same updates, because I'm lazy!

Newfangled Death soon! As usual! (I know, I'm terrible!)

(P.S. Thanks to everyone for the feedback in the last post)

Fresh Price of Bel Air

Good news! Newfangled Death—my little collection of stories—is near complete (for real this time) and should be available for everyone to purchase or ignore (or both!) in the coming weeks. New development: print editions will be available as well, for a few more bucks! They will be kind of skinny books, but they will love you all the same.

But, bad news, I've run into a minor dilemma, and I was hoping for some input from you guys.

I was planning on a $1 price point for the eBook version. That doesn't have to change, but here's why it became an issue:

- Amazon discourages any price below $2.99 by plummeting the royalty rates down.
- Apparently there are a lot of negative associations with $1 works (flooded "bargain bin" sentiment)
- For the amount of work and time involved, I need to price future releases of this length at at least $2.99 for any hope of ever supporting myself. Will people be upset to pay more for the same length of work?

And to be totally up front, the length of this work is approximately 55-65 pages the size of an average book.

I was considering the following:

- Stick to $1 this time.
- Make it free for the first day! Then price it $2.99.
- Make it $1 for a week or month, then bump it up to $2.99.
- Give it all up and become a blind jazz musician.

Any of those would be fine with me. What do you think?

Cookies

Sometimes it seems like there's a recipe to everything. As if no matter what you're doing, it's just a matter of throwing in the same ingredients, doing the same grunt work, and you'll get your cookies. Yeah it's rarely that simple at first, but once you get something right—or at least sort of right—it's so easy to get locked into the behaviour that achieved it.


Positive reinforcement can lead to genuine self-improvement for sure, but there's always the annoying danger of complacency on the side. Especially if it becomes something you start to crave or need.

Humanity was brilliant to invent money. Look how much good and bad it does, and all for a cookie we can't even eat.

...You can buy some though.