Here I am at the edge

Emptiness and solitude. I wondered how I would feel when I fell from grace, and now I know. All the time, my friends and colleagues told me my writing got better with each story, I had only one thought in mind - The higher you fly, the greater the fall when you fail to deliver. A nd that day arrived three years ago; since then I have been living in the hope things would turn around and my fortunes would return, but they never did. I also consider the quote by Walter Kronkite is apt at this point, he said: "Be sure to watch who you step on when you climb as they'll be sure to kick your ass when you fall." I never put anyone down, I never considered myself above anybody or above reproach form lousy work, so why attack someone as people did to me?

I don't blow my own trumpet enough. One thing I have been told many times is that I don't say to people how good I am as a writer . The reason I don't is that I feel self-praise is no praise at all. I'd instead paste the comments of other people telling how good they think I am. Unlike many writers, I don't turn my blogs into book blogs, even if there are two platforms to get my e-books  from  Amazon   and    Draft2Digital . The fact that one writer considered me such a threat she spent months trashing my award-winning e-book Chronicles of Mark Johnson online makes me laugh, after all, she is over 70.

I am not sure if being a multi-genre writer has helped me. Readers who have followed me for years will know that I earned reputations for writing in several genres. My earliest reply was for supernatural/ spiritual stories, later came crime, and finally science fiction. ​ I am not sure if this is a bonus. My Amazon bestseller is fiction based on a Victorian mystery Did we see him? . The only book to get a 5-star rating is based on a spiritual adventure Nerja . In recent times, I have written a Christian Fiction romance called A Homecoming . This book took two years to write and is a bargain at only $9.

Celebrity status Book signings https://hereiamattheedgeblogspotcouk.wordpress.com/2017/09/13/facing-my-fear/  are a running joke among my close friends and me. I go to some at our branch of  Waterstones , but the thought of doing one myself is daunting, the only time I tried to beat my fear of public speaking it came back and bit me.   I suppose if I turn my last  e-book   www.draft2digital.com/book/235628  into a paperback, I will need to consider doing a signing

I need to believe there will be good times to come I used to believe there were good days ahead, but I was fooling myself. Several years after I posted this blog, and the only change is that I no loger care if an eBook sells.

I write like Over the years, I have been told I write like E.A.Poe , Wilkie Collins , Sheridan LeFanu , H.P. Lovecraft and Ray Bradbury . The latest addition to the list is a fellow writer said I write like Dashiell Hammett 's Sam Spade when I narrate events in my life. Writers are often told to write similar in style to the books they read, in my case, that would be Westerns/Military history   https://hereiamattheedgeblogspotcouk.wordpress.com/2017/08/19/hells-mouth/ I haven't read many westerns, my reading was more towards the history aspect military history

Time on my hands As I am not doing a lot of writing these days, this will give me the opportunity to restore my collection of cd's to the memory on my USB stick.

WHY? Why did I return to #writing ? My writing was never about the money to me, after all beyond my #scifi  series Forgestriker  nothing has sold. To me, a sale is a sign of appreciation for the time invested, I only make $0.60 cents per #ebook .  The main reason I returned is that I needed a release for the build up of stress in my life over the last two months, it isn't only the fire that created the tension there are other issues involved.

Making your mark is impossible t's a writer's curse; we spend months writing a story, and then send it to a magazine, only to be told it isn't good enough - or is it? Is the case that the magazine didn't want to pay you? After all, once they have the story, it's upto them what happens next. We put our trust in people we don't know, and hope they're being honest.   WIth my latest rejection note, I am now batting 0 for 30, is it worth hoping anymore? ​   I stopped hopng ages ago, these last stories were sent to see if there was some hope for me, but there is none.

The time passes slowly As my health gets worse, I thank the Lord for giving me the ability to write stories - even if they don't get bought. The relevance of the Dollar is that the United States is the major buyer of my eBook selection. A secondary relevant factor is $1 is how much I earned a month, when I was writing ; mainly because I used to put my short story collection on my blog to read . Never mind, I have plans to write another few stories which I am not putting here, to see if I can gain a few sales .

Pinterest I don't often promote my  Pinterest   pages because they have very little to show for my efforts. The link to this post is for one of my pages, keep watching as I will be adding more.

Amazon Vs Barnes & Noble  My outlook  I can only speak for myself, and their values in my world of writing.  This month's sales on Barnes & Noble (11 e-books) are about three times what I expect to sell on Amazon this year.  Amazon.com has been of no use to my in my quest for sales. They continually mess up covers, never think of changing a cover -it is a nightmare. You can never get the site to understand the basics of writing - too many Asians - who can't understand English. That is why I will only be using Draft2Digital in the future.   D2D is always expanding their range. I may not see the benefit, but what works for some doesn't work for all. 

A chilling but true fact I never considered myself to be arrogant - most of my friends would say I'm too self-deprecating to be arrogant. Does the situation go back to my school days? Since my days at school, friends have told me that I can tell a good story, at first I thought nothing of the comment.  In later years, I chased the dream of being a writer. For over 40 years, I held onto those comments and I think this lead me to believe people might be willing to pay to read what I wrote - wrong! My blog is the proof of the pudding as we Brits would say. The blog gets over 300 pages read every day  and yet nobody is willing to pay less than the price of a coffee for my work. To me that says it all - if it is FREE - people will read what I write. E-books   In over 18 months, my series http://hereiamattheedge.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/forgestriker-collection.html#.VkTRl1XhDnA   has sold 580 e-books . But, only the title book did well, the rest of the seven...

How lives got changed forever Gertrude Stein   It was American authoress Gertrude Stein   http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/gertrude-stein   who coined the term "The Lost Generation http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/features/amliteuro/lostgen.html ," about the age of writers like herself who went to war in 1914, and whose lives were never the same. Artists all The Lost Generation included famous names such as    F. Scott Fitzgerald , [1]   T. S. Eliot ,  James Joyce ,  Sherwood Anderson ,  John Dos Passos ,  John Steinbeck ,  William Faulkner ,  Waldo Peirce ,  Isadora Duncan ,  Abraham Walkowitz ,  Alan Seeger ,  Franz Kafka ,  Henry Miller ,  Aldous Huxley ,  Louis-Ferdinand Céline ,  Erich Maria Remarque   and the composers   Sergei Prokofiev ,  Paul Hindemith ,  George Gershwin , and Aaron Copland .    Life takes a new meaning whe...

Time to accept a reality   Many people - not only my friends - have told me that I am a good writer.  The time has come for me to accept this fact, more than anything the factor that had me unconvinced - and to an extent it still does - is the fact that despite the mass sales for my e-book Forgestriker ; the series   http://hereiamattheedge.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/forgestriker-collection.html#.Vi9utlXtmko  as a whole didn't sell well. Despite the restricted sales for the series, Sons of Baal and Forgestriker must be good reading as they have not stopped selling in almost two years. Chronicles of Mark Johnson It is true, I did win an award - three years ago - for the opening book in the Mark Johnson series. My pain is that neither this book or its sequel sold.  Ghost stories    One of the things that changed my mind is this month my ghost stories have started to sell. One thing that always stopped me believing I was a good wri...