While undergoing my ebook file creation experiment, I re-read the latest draft for Diffused States first chapter.

I liked it. I didn't love it. I'm trying to decide why. I've been reviewing a lot of my work recently. It's a comfort to realize how much I've enjoyed them. This is a sign that I've nearly cemented my writing style. I don't look at something I've done and regret the way a sentence is composed or a passage is paced.

Go back and read anything you wrote 10 years ago. It'll look like an airshow disaster's aftermath. Forcing your current creative brain to shake hands with your brain from 10 days ago, 10 months ago, or 10 years ago is an uncomfortable feeling.

This leaves us with a requisite call to action. I'm not in love with what I've written. I've drafted and edited the piece in question as recently as a month ago. What does this mean? What's the next step to engage with your work?

I took a few minutes today draft an .epub version for Suns Go Dark's most recent draft. I didn't decide to create an .epub file right out of the gate. That was what I ended up creating after exploring my options online for a moment.

More on that further down.

I had been idle for too long. This is good and bad for writing. Per Stephen King in his fantastic semi-autobiography / creative method guidebook On Writing, he always builds in a 6-month phase for a manuscript to sit in a drawer. He writes it. Then he lets it rest. Then he reads it again to see if it still entertains or surprises him.

Every time I re-read Suns Go Dark after letting it rest, it alarms me how much I enjoy it.

In Ghost Little's 2016 relaunch, I decided on a whim to create a wiki for the site. It's been a rewarding experience. It remains a work in progress. I've been adding and updating pages for each story's production history, as time allows. This has been a remarkable history lesson for me. Looking back at what has become 5+ years of writing for myself on the Internet, my growth, changes in style, changes in motivation, and the development of real direction.

And, hey, despite the rampant unchecked impostor-syndrome that any creative person worth their salt will feel, it's pretty reassuring that writing all this stuff did not literally kill me with anxiety for thinking I had a cool idea for a story.

The goal now is to do something every day related to Ghost Little. This hopefully means daily updates to the blog. It's a fun process. The very act of doing something each day keeps me honest. I also hope it might motivate others to realize that despite it being a difficult commitment, it's doable. Even if every day doesn't work, I owe it to myself to do some action with regularity.

Accessing point-of-sale data on hundreds of thousands of Target stores, hackers lifted the credit card information from 40 million customer accounts on Black Friday, 2013. Elementary malware bounced the seized numbers to a rented server in Russia. Target’s $1.6 million worth of Pentagon-level security proved insufficient defense.

In October, 2014, Sony Pictures was hacked, and intruders stole everything that wasn’t nailed down—production notes on The Amazing Spider-Man 2, personal employee data, and heated email exchanges between studio executives. It’s all indexed on Wikileaks now.

Most recent of all, 1.1 million personal electronic health records, valued at $60-70 apiece, were stolen in a cyber attack on Washington D.C.-area CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield servers. The data was reported stolen on May 14, 2015.

Trouble is, evidence shows the actual theft occurred in June, 2014.

Hackers have smelled the blood in the water. Customer data was snatched up. Millions were stolen. Public trust was weakened. The revelation that there was almost zero accountability or regulatory reformation afterward is perhaps the most upsetting of all.

Let’s face it, you’re capable of typing a darn good email. You can craft an effective communique, or to assemble a commanding presentation, or to close a sale.

No, instead, I have found my greatest challenge is plain and simple: the tough days. I don’t know about you, but on my best days, I notice my productivity is stronger for obvious reasons. I am rested. I am clear-headed. I am energized. These are good days. They are too rare.

It isn’t that professionals in relationship-focused roles can’t afford to have tough days. We can afford to strive for more good days. To everyone’s benefit, right?

So, to be more efficient on the job, more often, one must also be efficient at recharging in life.

How do we achieve this?

I am convinced I became the person I am today because my bedroom window faced east.

Some people, hippie people, believe their children are born under a certain star and become senators, or the kid trips into a vat of radioactive violins and becomes musician, and that that is how destiny works. They’re valid interpretations, but my theory is grounded in reality.

It isn’t a superpower, but it is a mythology. My parents moved my family to Vermont when I was three and my bedroom windows faced east. Straight up our long driveway, toward the mountains, and toward the rising sun. As far as I’m concerned that was when I was born, so I’m theoretically twenty-seven, through revised mathematics.

You want your characters to elicit a reaction. Violence, disgust, joy, anger, they need to summon something in your guts. Perhaps they carry an identifiable trait. Perhaps they remind you of somebody, or some time, or some place.

They MUST be exceptional. Why else would we want to read about them then? They cannot just be a person in an interesting place. That is not enough to engage. It will leave the reader skipping dialog and going straight for the setting. Then they are left wondering.

Some stories can skate by on a unique setting, but the magic trick is that a unique setting just becomes the best character, so you've sort of succeeded in that case, but not well.

Take, for example, a story I wrote about a prayer-server in a world where middle management administers divine retribution to those who pray for it. The most important thing about that story was that Heaven had a backlog and was behind on its work.

The character was a nothing. He was a tour bus. Most of the interesting writing was going on elsewhere.

You need an exceptional character that can contest against an environment, exceptional or otherwise.

Let's try to flesh out this failed character.

Destiny is a $60 bookshelf.

Part 1: Why Is It So Hard To Reviews Destiny?

Bad marketing can turn insecure people into jerks.

You've seen folks of that sort, their words weed-whacker buzzing and thrashing all about the Internet, summoning the jargon they've been taught to justify a purchase. Good jargon indicates good marketing and good long-tail marketing contains language to turn customers into delighted evangelists. Ideally, these people promote a product long after the purchase. Once the person has bought the item, and experienced it, they’ll want to talk about its worth beyond the dollar amount applied to it. It doesn't matter if it's a $1000 iPhone 6 pre-order or a $60 copy of Destiny. When certain people buy things, they’re going to have to talk themselves into the purchase again and again.

During the PS4 Destiny beta, I found myself falling into hours-long hysterical fits while creating dramatic, epic haircuts and unlovable face in the game's character creator.

I encourage you to study my full Vanilla Destiny review here and speculation on rumors surrounding the Rise of Iron expansion here.

You can also discover Ghost Little's Destiny-inspired Suns Go Dark, part of our free books collection.

You can enjoy the character creator's greatest hits below:

Marvel Cinematic Universe’s modern era of storytelling continuity welcomes everybody to the dork-engineered popular culture.

I remember walking out of a podunk two-screen theater in May, 2008, and it was still cold. My ego was glowing and my friend and I were congratulating each other. We had previously relished in the noir film Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang, starring Robert Downey Jr. as an wit-soaked con man who was clawing and self-narrating his way out of the gutter of small-time New York crookery into LA’s equally-loathly private investigation scenery. Seeing Downey as a maximum-level skuzzball in that film armed my friend and I with insider knowledge that not many knew—he was visionary casting as Tony Stark, aka Iron Man.

We hadn't really realized this was the start of the shared universe craze.