The Author's Exchange Podcast: Grace Grossman Fridays a Noon EST S1 Ep 6

This week on The Author's Exchange, Host Capt. Chris German sits down with author Grace Grossman, author of the self-help novel Chill Out and Cheer Up. Tune in here on YouTube or download and listen to the podcast on your favorite platform. Click here to download You can find more info about Grace and her novel at https://www.thechartedlife.net/theauthors. This episode is sponsored by The Bearded Men Podcast available at www.BeardedMenRadio.com and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/beardedmenradio and by The Cinemaniacs Podcast available at https://thecinemaniacspod.wordpress.com/ and by The Awe Gee's Shop at https://www.thechartedlife.net/AWEGS and Whither We Tend, a novel by the host of the show Captain Christopher German. It is available in print, e-book, and audio versions wherever you find good books to read or listen to. https://www.thechartedlife.net/whitherwetend Brought to you by The Charted Life. #Gracegrossman #Chilloutandcheerup #thechartedlife #captchrisgerman #theauthorsexchange #thegreatloop #whitherwetend S1Ep5 Download here https://pdcn.co/e/www.buzzsprout.com/1382929/8363999-the-author-s-exchange-podcast-grace-grossman-fridays-a-noon-est-s1-ep-6.mp3?blob_id=38044024&download=true

Whither We Tend, A novel that takes a look into US

The reviews are in and Whither We Tend is a five-star novel for the people. A book for American's about Americans. #captchrisgerman #witherwetend #thechartedlife

I Wrote A Book And No One Wants To Read to It

 
A couple months back I had the notion to write a book. I think it's pretty good and so do a few others, but the problem is no one wants to read it. 

Oh, it's not that it's written in Middle English or on a subject like "the primordial growths in newborn inhabitants of Subsaharan Africa" or anything like that. Not that either of those factors should dissuade you from reading a book, but let's face it, neither is likely to boast a million dollars in sales from Amazon. 

No, Whither We Tend is a political dystopian fairytale that is likely to piss off liberals and Trump-lovers alike. Conservatives would probably also hate it, but there are like five of them left in 2021 and I have no idea how to reach them as a demographic anymore. 

Why do I think they will hate it? Because they won't read it. 

The minute anyone hears "political" people get all hot and bothered that their precious opinions will be questioned and that is a great reason to not invest in new ideas. Because after all, that is what a book is.  A collection of new ideas. 

My new ideas happen to be about the chances that America will slide into civil war in the upcoming years. As everyone knows, the Trumpists aren't going anywhere and the Libs are even more intransigent in their political leanings. When two sides refuse to budge, the invariable outcome is usually something violent. 

Take for example a subductive fault line in the Earth's crust.  Two tectonic plates crashing into each other, each refusing to yield. One must go above and the other below but having no brain, they push and push at each other until an earthquake erupts and a new mountain chain is born. 

The mountains created and the Earthquake that creates them are on the highest order of violence and oceans are moved and civilization crushed with its occurrence. Such is the nature of Earthly motions. 

Humans are made of ocean water and dust from cosmic collisions. They are animated with a touch of the Holy Spirit and motivated by the hand of God alone. Can you tell me that when they collide with unyielding force, that the Earth might not tremble and civilization not come crashing down as well?

So too fell Rome, and the Monarchs of Europe when the populous moved. The Nations of today were built from the ashes of yesterday and might not these civilizations also fall someday in similar accord?

 The United States of America was itself the first to initiate the dismantling of the English Empire. Might not they also be tending towards dismantilization, when we can no longer feed our families, and plague besets our people?

Well, I wrote a book about it and I aim to write two more to complete the tale. But no one will read it, because no one can find it. 

My book is one of over 500,000 new books in the market place right now. It might be a rival of a work by Hemingway or Tolstoy, but it won't be even considered because unlike them, I am in an Ocean of authors and through navigating a maelstrom of information right now.

To get it to stand out, I am told I need reviewers to bless my book online and tell people how much they enjoyed reading it for other people to find it. And to get those reviews, I need to buy them. 

Money is the name of the game in book sales and they say the term for it is promotion. The more I spend on promoting my book, the more likely it is to make money. 

Forget for a moment that my book is about what might actually occur to the people of America, I need to pay people to say they have read it, to get other people to read it when all I am trying to do is tell them to look for it. There something decidedly wrong about paying someone $600 to port a review to get other people to buy it. And I don't want to do it. 

Instead, I would prefer I to try and harness the very forces that will be the source of America's undoing, the authors. 

With 500,000 authors all trying to sell their books at the same time, what if we all worked together to read each other's books and peer review them for each other? If even a small fraction of all those authors, who know the perils of creating a novel through first-hand experience, reviewed my book then I could reach 100 or 200 reviews in short order. In return, I could provide them with my review of their book in exchange, 100 times over. If 200 authors bought my book, then I would have the money to buy the book of 200 other authors and the circle would be complete. 

What I am thinking is starting a Facebook group of published authors. You publish your link of your book on the page and someone who thinks they would like to read your book responds with a link for their book. You each can ensure that your book is something you feel confident that you can fairly review and if you both agree, you swap stories, they buy your book and you buy theirs and read it and review it. 

Whether they like your book or not should be irrelevant because a review is a review whether it is good or bad. But for this to work, we ought to keep it positive and if you don't like the book, you should have the honor to do no harm. Find the positives and refrain from trash talking. 

Example: The book was not to my liking, but the cover and binding were professional and it looked good on my bookshelf. 2 stars

The golden rule should be the guiding principle in every reviewer's playbook, but particularly if you are a fellow published author, do unto others as you would have done to you. 

As an author though, if out of 50 peer reviews all say your work is two stars, then perhaps you should take that as advice and review your manuscript and republish. The good news is you still got fifty reviews though and that will help you sell some books online, even if it is the worst of dogs in books. 

The bad news is you have to head back to the drawing board and start again. But now you have read 50 other books and hopefully have learned a thing or two to make you a better writer. And who knows, in 20 years, maybe your book will be a cult classic and we were all wrong. But you have had 50 peers look at your work with compassion and the whole experience didn't cost you several thousand dollars, but instead, you broke even. 

The big paid reviewers make no promise that their reviews will be any better and costs as much as $600 per review. How is that a good business model? 

You will not be allowed in the group without proof of a published book. It is something that Good reads should have done already, but since they haven't I will. It's free to join and if there are others like it, share them with me and I will join them too. But since it costs nothing, here's the group if you want to join 

https://www.facebook.com/groups/2483450521961934

I found a 22" Brass Propeller & Had A Thought

 Whither We Tend is about the next chapters for the US in the wake of a historical pandemic and political upheaval. It is my hope that you are insp[tried to build a better America in this time of change. I invite you to read it as a beginning to a conversation about tomorrow.

Whither we tend is available at all major bookstores. if it isn't at your, ask the manager, to order a copy for you! Or buy yours today at https://www.thechartedlife.net/whitherwetend Read my latest blog, Who is Simon and Gus? at https://whitherwetend.blogspot.com/2021/02/who-is-simon-and-gus.html #whitherwetend #thechartedlife #captchristopherman #thegreatloop

Who is Simon and Gus?

 Asking a writer to explain his novel is like asking a painter to explain his painting. It cant be done and that's not why it was made in the first place.

Whither We Tend was written with the idea that things are wrong with America. The poor get poorer, the hungry go unfed and we have children in cages on the Mexican border. There is a pandemic raging that may have a vaccine, but I have no idea if I will ever live long enough to get it because a 70-year old retiree is deemed more important than a teacher or a Walmart worker. 

There is one political party that believes satanic pedophiles are taking over the world and another political party that thinks we are so stupid that they can force-feed us their anointed politicians. The sad part is both are right to some degree and I have no idea what to believe anymore. 

The last year has been one disappointment after the next when it came to expecting anything from the US Government. The stimulus checks were a joke. The pandemic response is and was a joke. The SBA, the State Department, and even the US Coast Guard dropped the ball when it came to doing their jobs for the last year.  

Hell, the IRS stopped taking calls sometime last winter and stopped processing returns. All of a sudden last week, they came back to life and in doing so, seemed to ignore the 150 pleas we made through my congressman's office to give our refund back to us because of financial hardship and in lieu of the stimulus checks that never seemed to show up. They still haven't acknowledged that we submitted our 2019 tax return on their website, but had the thoughtfulness to tell us by mail that they were keeping our refund because they needed the money more than we did. 

My wife looked at me the other day and said, "You know, it's really expensive to be poor."

She of course is right.

In truth today, we are all heading toward poverty and oblivion, some faster than others, The thing about oblivion is,  once your there, it is like climbing out of a hole at the beach. You just keep pulling the sand down upon you as you try to climb out until the tide comes in and drowns you. 

It was with all these thoughts that I wrote the book. The two men in it, Simon and Gus, are really just two sides of me. One is a stable establishment kinda guy who sees the writing on the wall but can read it, while the other is a jaded battle-weary soul who just wants to throw it all away and start again. 

They were born from those two ideas but became personalities in their own right. As I was writing it, my wife would could home daily and I would give her updates on Gus and Simon and the adventures they had today. They really were just two sides of me though and when writing I sometimes would forget myself and exchange their names mid-chapter much to my editor's confusion. 

Once they were written however and the book was sent off to the publisher, the copyright filed and the audio files rendered, that was when they become yours. Simon and Gus belong to you, the reader. 

They are yours to use and learn from. Yours to love and hate. In this novel, I have no more I can give them and they, along with the direction the United States takes in this book, is yours alone. However you envision the Army will grow under Gus' leadership, or the Patriotic Unity Stations grow with Simon and his team of volunteers, is up to you. 

I can tell you in the next book, Governments of Men, which is painfully stalled somewhere in the Arizona desert right now while I work to make a living by sharing Whither We Tend, they check back in and all hell breaks loose with President Crawford and the Independent Army of Resistance. But it is the adventure they make in the first book that inspires my ideas for them in the second book. 

That is why I wrote Whiter We Tend.  To share the adventures of Simon and Gus with you as they work to survive in this collapsing hole of existence we are heading toward. It is my hope that you can be ripped from the pain of life today to imagine if just for a few hundred pages what we as a Nation could become.

 I wrote so that we could imagine a better place together and talk about it and envision what could come next. I wrote it because there will be a 2024 and life will go on and it is ours to imagine. Let's imagine it together, shall we?

The Reason for Whither We Tend

You might ask, why would anyone write a novel about the coming of a second civil war? With all that is going wrong with America, I say why not?

Check it out in print or e-book today at 

www.thechartedlife.net/whitherwetend

#whitewetend #thechartedlife #Blacklivesmatter #Nonstimuluschecks #failededucation #healthcarethatsucks #congressisbroken #stopthesteal #cagedchildreniswrong #ETC.

Lake Powell, The Great Drought, Wither We Tend

In Book Two of the Whither We Tend series, we envision what the world would be like without Lake Powell. But in real life, the lake is drawing down fast due to environmental change. Have a look! if you would like to purchase the ebook version of Whither We Tend, it is available at https://amzn.to/2LMPL4b​ #lakepowell​ #Utah​ #Thechartedlfie​ #captchristophergerman​ #whitherwetend