I’ll start rewriting that one as soon as I’m back from Israel. I’ll be spending a week over there in early June—one night in Jerusalem, then the rest of the stay in Tel Aviv. I conveniently chose my dates so the Tel Aviv Gay Pride will occur while I’m around. Fucking convenient, isn’t it?

Anyway, I’m almost done writing another story—a science-fiction adventure, yay!—, and I’m still in the process of rereading the first draft of an urban fantasy I wrote before that. It’ll be the next story to go to my beta reader. We’ll see how that fares.

One last thing before I go, I’ve decided to try Amazon’s KDP Select, which means I had to take Spacejet down from other retailers. I haven’t yet enrolled to the Select program, because it takes time to notify all the retailers. What does it mean for you, Potential Reader? It’ll mean promos, discounts, and free shit.

And finally, CreateSpace now offers free shipping to Europe. So, I’ll certainly check it out when the time to launch the French novel draws near (I’m also considering it for Spacejet, ’cause why the hell not.) More on that, as the events develop.

I wrote, self-edited, self-proofed, and self-published an indie novel, a quirky space adventure called Spacejet. It’s out there for your entertainment (available from this list of retailers). I had tons of fun making it, and I didn’t go crazy rereading it a million times to ready it for publication so there’s a decent chance other people can enjoy it too.

Apart from this one, I have three stories at various stages of production:

1. a big-ass science-fiction novel intended as the first installment of a series—final draft;
2. an urban fantasy novel, in French, about a werewolf—first draft;
3. an urban fantasy novel, in English—first draft;
4. a science-fiction novel in the making (about 30,000 words in).

I’ve just finished rereading the French novel and handed it over to my beta reader. We’ll see how that goes. In a month or two, I’ll reread the English urban fantasy. By then, the first draft of the new science-fiction novel will be done. At that point I will decide which one will follow Spacejet to the electronic shelves. (I’m also toying with the idea of writing a sequel to Spacejet.)

In short, I’m busy writing stuff. I’m busy carrying out the mission life imprinted in my mind. I’m content, fulfilled, and terrified I might fail, but confident that today is not the day I stop trying.

Like a fucking shark: ever onward.

Last week, I read about Planetary Resources. In a nutshell, it’s a bunch of rich people banding up together to do… something… something space-related… and resource-related. That’s about all we know, so far. That and a quotation from Diamandis, one of the guys behind the project, who told Forbes:

Since my childhood I’ve wanted to do one thing, be an asteroid miner. So stay tuned on that one. (Source: Forbes)

Space-wise, my life has been a long streak of disappointments. I still remember how wrecked I was when Hubble was launched and they announced there was a problem with the lens. To me it was as if all the secrets of the universe were about to be unlocked, then suddenly… wait, no, we’ll, just take a few blurry pictures and be done with it. (Fortunately, they managed to work around the flaw.)

The last disappointment to date was the last flight of the space shuttle. I cried like a bitch during launch—I mean, sobbed, literally. It was awful. In my lifetime, two shuttles exploded, a space telescope misfired, and then the whole shuttle program was canned. And don’t get me started on Mars or NASA’s budget. They took my dream and shat in its mouth, then had a good laugh about it.

So, naturally, I’m a bit wary about this whole Planetary Resources thing. I’m afraid to be disappointed again. Some people say they are going to mine asteroids. I think that’s a possibility. But what’s more of a possibility is they’re going to announce that they intend to mine asteroids in 2045 or some similar timeframe. And that, you have to admit, would sound a lot like, ‘Oh yeah, the asteroids. We’re gonna mine those someday, you know. In the future.’

I want none of that. I want space, now. I want ambition, now. I want that frontier breached in a thousand places at once. What we need is not some weak-ass project to do some shit someday; what we need is a fleet of starships, shuttles 2.0. Now—not on next Sunday!

Still, I need to dream, however badly they all treated my dream. So, until tomorrow when they make their big announcement, I’m going to believe that Diamandis and his buddies are going to re-open the road to space—not in twenty years, but today. And I’m telling you, if they need grunts to break rocks or madmen on suicide missions, they’re gonna get them.

They’re gonna get me, dammit!

I don’t think I can emphasize the last word enough: DAILY. Regularity is key. Take one or maybe two days off during the weekend, but that’s it. The rest of the week not a day passes without you picking up a book or writing shit down.

Of course, I’m not suggesting you write everything that passes through your brain. While that can be useful to learn more about yourself, that’s not what training a skill looks like. For writing to become more than mere soup, you need to reread what you’ve written, edit, rewrite, and more often than not, thrash that piece of crap so fast it won’t even register on anyone’s retinae.

If you can, I also encourage you to get comments from someone who can criticize writing. That’s not easy to find. Liking books in general or “the type of things you write” does not qualify anyone to become a critic. The key is not taste, it’s honesty.

I have someone in my life who couldn’t lie if his life depended on it, and his bluntness is invaluable. Sure, giving him something to read is not always a pleasant experience. But if I wanted pleasure, I would be masturbating, not writing. Writing is a craft; injuries do happen.

His opinion of my writing is, of course, worth what it’s worth. I don’t expect him to tell me how to make my writing perfect—it would be nice, but no one can do that. But what he does is he’s teaching to writing to please not myself, but him as well. I’m writing for two now, me and my ideal reader (who, lucky me, happens to live under the same roof as I).

That’s the kind of skill everyone needs. Why? Because it teaches us how to give shape to our thoughts in a manner that makes them accessible to others. It teaches us how to make a clear account of events, how to advance our arguments, how to focus on the necessary parts of a story, and how to scrap all that is dead weight.

That can only be achieved with feedback. Find that person who can say to your face your work is a heap of shit and hold on to them till your last breath. They may be wrong at times, but they will never be dishonest. Also, try to find someone who doesn’t have a stake in what you do or a personal agenda.

Same goes with reading. You have to train yourself to not just read, but to see how what you’re reading was written. You need to see the wheels turning behind the pretty pictures the words evoke—the ugly, greasy wheels. Yes, it’ll take away some of the magic. You’re a magician yourself now, so deal with it.

Meditate, learn new skills, write and read critically, and do it all daily. It might seem like a lot, but someday you’ll be eighty. By then, you’ll either be a drooling wreck, or a fine, elderly gentleman whose mind is still dazzling bright.

And no, I’m not talking about you anymore.

Right now, I’m dealing the cards for that old man. I want him in the best shape imaginable, and I want him to write. More than anything else, I want him to think.

You often hear that kids are better at learning than adults (especially the elderly). While, as far as I know, it’s true, it doesn’t mean we inexorably lose the ability to learn. The real problem is, beyond school or college, most of us stop training that ability.

I’m no exception. It’s been a while since I’ve really learned something. Something brand new, something my brain had never done before. So, it was time to go back to school. Or rather, homeschool because I work better on my own.

About two weeks ago or so, I started learning Mandarin.

Mandarin is perfect for my goal, because it involves my ability to learn new language skills (and “new” here is an understatement). But it also requires other abilities, like the motor skills to draw the Chinese characters—not to mention different types of memory too.

It don’t intent to become fluent in speaking Mandarin. What I really want is to be able to read the language. That will require a decent knowledge of the grammar (which is simple) and the ability to “speak” the words in my mind (which is harder, but a lot easier than speaking them out loud to a Chinese and be understood), plus an encyclopedic knowledge of the symbols themselves.

It’s gonna be hard, it’s gonna be long. But the point is not success, the point is the effort, the training, the fucking journey. My brain controls the throat that speaks, the hand that draws, and the memory that remembers. I can’t think of a better training to stimulate my brain.

It’s like lifting weights with my mind—tiny weights that look like this: 你會說普通話嗎？(*)

(*) It just means “Can you speak Mandarin?” Which is close to the extent of my current knowledge… and a pretty useless thing for a foreigner to say.

There aren’t many things I can do about the state my brain is in. Damage to the brain is permanent or close to it. I used to drink and did a fair amount of drugs in my twenties; that can’t be undone. What I can do is prevent further damage and encourage the growth of what remains intact.

Obviously, alcohol and drugs are out (I’m including tobacco, too, of course). But what I discovered recently is that meditation strengthens the brain. I had no idea, so I looked into that a bit and found this interesting video:

The speaker is Sam Harris, who is a rationalist. That particularly appealed to me, because I can’t stand the religious bullshit around meditation—even the Buddhist bullshit—, and stripped of all the magical mumbo jumbo, meditation is actually quite interesting.

Basically, meditation is about focusing the mind on something and sustaining that focus for a certain period of time: five minutes, half an hour, or more (check this source for a clever, detailed summary). You can focus your attention on your breathing or lock your visual attention on an object—whatever works best. The important thing is to sustain that focus.

Try it, it’s hard. Very hard. The mind wanders. The mind bombards you with a barrage of thoughts, all the time. The aim of meditation is to learn how to order the mind to shut the fuck up. As someone who has long used alcohol and drugs for that purpose, I can assure you that mastering that ability appeals to me.

Imagine you’re looking at the sea. What are you actually seeing? Are you seeing the sea? No, dang it! You’re seeing the waves. That’s exactly what meditating feels like: it’s trying to see the sea and not the waves. You got it; the waves are the thoughts, of course. Meditating is reaching beyond them.

Now, while transcending those pesky thoughts and reaching a quieter, more peaceful state of consciousness is great, what I’m also after is strengthening my brain. My brain is my tool (it’s everybody’s tool, as a matter of fact); imagination, which is a product of my brain, is my tool. I need my brain to be a fighter, youthful and energetic.

So, twenty minutes each day, I try to focus, to reach out to the sea beyond the waves, to sample its depth, to drown in its quietude, and it helps. Really, try it! You will fail, but don’t get discouraged after the first try. Keep at it!

It put a smile on my face. Then it got me reminiscing.

My high school years weren’t exactly the best time in my life. On most days, I wanted to die. On days when we had gym, I wanted it real bad.

I’ve never been able to catch a ball; I was scrawny, awkward, and although everybody always told me I could “pass”, no one has a better gaydar than a teenage kid. In short, high school was hell.

I’ve never been very religious, but I’ve been very desperate at times. When gym day was coming up, I would spend the night before bargaining with God. Surely, if he had some form of kindess in His heart, he would make gym not happen? Well, think again. Gym did happen, and so did humiliation.

Just like in the videos, it did get better. I didn’t even have to wait until after high school. My senior year was even sort of OK. But I never completely recovered. Even today, if I have to walk past a bunch of kids kicking a ball, I do so with a knot in my stomach. (If you want to make me really uncomfortable, just toss a ball at me. I will revert to the insecure kid for a flash—just for a flash, past that you’ll be in trouble.)

Even so, I reckon I’m one of the lucky ones. Every time I think back on those years, I can’t help thinking about all those who did not make it. What infuriates me most is that many times their deaths were written off as the result of depression, as if they were just bored with life and wanted out.

Allow me to call bullshit on that.

When a teenager commits suicide, it’s not because he is mildy depressed. It’s because someone, other kids, drove him to it. It’s outright murder. Not with a gun or a knife—with worse. He was murdered with a sneer and a laugh. So, he couldn’t catch a ball and that jock over there could? Now he’s dead, and the useless idiot in the varsity jacket lives. The world lost something in the bargain.

Even the best, wealthiest, most-successful catcher of balls who ever lived does not compare, not even for a minute, with the least of the successful nerds out there. Because we fucking rule, and I’m fucking proud of us. We could never catch a fucking ball, but we are clever, we dream big, and against all odds and against all the bullies in high school, we endured. For the most part, they didn’t. For every dead nerd who didn’t make it through high school, there are ten washed-up jocks who haven’t done shit with their lives and ten faded cheerleaders who blended in the background.

The rest is us nerds, living the dream. I just wish we didn’t take so much casualties on the way here. No one deserves to want to be dead because of idiots laughing. It makes for a bitter victory, one we cannot share with the most sensitive of us, the ones who might just have been the most brilliant of all.

The good things are you, Esteemed Readers. It may not seem like much, but thanks to you, I have now earned enough royalties to be expected to pay taxes. It’s not a lot of money, at all, but it warms my little heart, because it means people out there have committed some of their hard-earned money to my writing—to read my writing! And I haven’t received any hate mail (Spacejet-related anyway), yet. So far so good.

I’m bringing this up, because I want to thank you, say how grateful I am, and also because of the tax thing. As a non-US resident earning royalties through US publishers (namely, Smashwords and Amazon), I will have to go through a whole process with the IRS in order to not pay taxes in the US, but in Belgium instead. And by that I mean, at this point I would be expected to pay taxes in the US and in Belgium.

(To be honest, I hate pushing papers, so if the USA were the only country asking for a bit of my money, I wouldn’t hesitate a second: I’d become an American taxpayer—even though I’d pay 30% instead of 15% in Belgium.)

From what I read it’s a rather complicated process, so I just wanted to mention it here now, because I’m going to talk about it some more in the future. I think it might be of some help to other indie writers out there, who will have to go through this in the future.

At this point, I’ve requested a lettre from Smashwords stating stuff that the IRS wants stated in print. I will have to append this to a form, which I have also downloaded from the Smashwords interface (go to your Smashwords Dashboard, to the section where you can edit your payment info). And… I’m waiting. There’ll be a lot of that.

As I said, more on that topic in the coming weeks.

In any case, however the IRS thing goes in the future, I feel pretty awesome. I’m grateful and happy and proud, too. I’ve come a long way since my drunken, pointless days, and even though there’s still a very, very long way to go, I’m glad I finally made positive choices and changes in my life. It wasn’t just wishful thinking this time; I acted upon my decisions.

Spacejet is the product of that. So will all the future books be. And by the way, I’m starting on a new story today, so… yay!

I was born about a decade after Armstrong’s first step and only five years after the end of the Apollo program. I missed it all. And today, what do we have to show for it? A nice plaque gathering dust somewhere on the Moon, with Nixon’s autograph on it.

That’s fucking depressing (in no small part because it’s Nixon’s autograph).

We went to the Moon, and then we gave up. There are no longer any plans for the West to go to Mars. I think I read the Chinese had Martian ambitions, but we no longer do. That’s us now: unambitious. The saddest thing in all this is we only went to the Moon because we needed to flex our muscles in the face of the Russians. (And who am I kidding? We didn’t do shit. The USA went to the Moon—nobody else did.)

There never was any dream to explore the universe; it was only about them commies.

It’s sad, because I think there are still many Armstrongs on this world, aspiring to step on another, then another, and yet one more. But they won’t get a chance to. Good pilots will be sent to bomb Iran or die trying. Good scientists and engineers will busy themselves building better guns.

I like guns as much as the next guy, but an old six-shooter kills as well as a modern pistol. We don’t need better guns. We got all the guns we could ever want. What this world needs—what the Western world needs—is a new Frontier and with it, a new Frontier spirit.

Whatever happened to that? Give me boat that can sail to the stars, give me a gun, and wave me good-bye. I won’t care if there’s a chance of coming home as long as there’s still one more star to reach. No man worthy of the name would back away from that.

Thanks to my teachers, I can at least write about it.

It really got me thinking, because I write science-fiction and science-fiction is often concerned with aliens and how to depict them. Now this bit of news is relevant, because it kind of makes it necessary for any land-bound species to use some limbs for locomotion and others for carrying shit around. We suspected that, obviously, but now we’re closer to being sure.

Of course, it all depends on how many legs you’ve got. But if you decide that your alien species evolved from a critter with four legs, well, standing is the only evolutionary move that makes sense—because of gravity! If you’re horizontal and carry something in your forelegs, your center of gravity finds itself way off your support polygon. As a result, you will fall flat on your nose. To achieve balance, your weight must be supported by your rear legs. You have to stand.

So, if you’re wondering if you got your alien species right, you have to ask yourself, “What challenges did their ancestors have to overcome?” and, “What were those ancestors like?” There’s no way, given the conditions they lived in, that our ancestors could have evolved into giant, tentacled amoebae.

Also, there’s a good chance that, if felines or canines had evolved to sentience instead of primates, they would have looked what we now call humanoid. At some point the cat people or the dog people would have had to carry shit around.

As a consequence, don’t be shy if you’re aliens don’t look that alien. And if you find them too human, get creative with the details, biological or cultural. After all, it’s not just about science. We, the readers, want to be entertained too.