Tag: free short story

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5 Weird Things I’ve Never Shared With You

5 Weird Things I’ve Never Shared With You in the whole three years I’ve been writing this blog. How can I be sure? I’ve just learned about them in the past month.

But first, let’s have this:

I wasn’t planning to count this as one weird thing since it’s satire, but I wanted to start with something funny.

Okay, this next item begins the weirdness:

This triggered so many things in my mind: first, the cloaking field from Star Trek.

The Enterprise decloaking

Next, Harry Potter’s cloak of invisibility:

https://giphy.com/gifs/harry-potter-magic-J5lxA8X7kisRG
Harry Potter getting his invisibility on

But the oldest example is below:

The Invisible Man – “I’ll show you!”

On we go to the next weird thing.

Your Second Weird Thing of 5 Weird Things

How can I not have the phrase ‘intelligent slime mold’ in my blog post? You may ask, ‘How can a slime mold be intelligent?” They can efficiently solve the famous ‘Travelling Salesman’ problem. You haven’t heard of that? Check out the following article:

5 Weird Things
The Travelling Salesman Problem – click the image for more

Earlier in my life, I worked in operations research and this problem was difficult to solve by computer. How difficult? It belongs to a class of problems called ‘NP hard problems’. That means the difficulty goes up as a factorial (1*2*3 = 3 factorial) of the number of cities.

You can solve this by brute computing force, but the slime mold does it without brains! That’s weird.

Your Third Weird Thing

But first, a book break!

I am an author, so I love books. Tell me your favorite and I’ll send you a free short story.

On to our next weird thing! How about a robot that does gymnastics? It also weighs about four hundred pounds.

If this robot isn’t grist for a science fiction story, then I’ve never read SciFi before!

The Penultimate Weird Thing

I love vocabulary for its own sake, ever since I read the ‘Abecedarian Book’ when I was twelve. Penultimate is one of those weird words you read, but may not know the meaning. Look it up.

I read this book when I was 12.

Your new weird thing begins here.

Do you believe this?

You know it’s weird when you can’t believe it (I didn’t) and yet it’s true.

The Last Weird Thing of 5 Weird Things – And Free Stuff

Who doesn’t like dragons?

Finally, I bid you adieu!

5 Weird Things
Andy Zach at Archon in St. Louis

PS: I forgot to tell you where you can get free stuff.

First, you can get 31 free books here:

5 Weird Things
Click image to get 31 free books

Then, you can get my comic paranormal animal book, Zombie Turkeys here:

5 Weird Things
Click to get your free copy
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How You Can Publish 4 Books in 3 Years Like Andy Zach

How You Can Publish 4 Books in 3 Years – stop reading! Go to the first part of this blog now, How I Published 4 Books in 3 Years.

If you just came here for the first time, welcome! I’ve been a self-published author for three years and I’ve blogged the whole time.

But you want to know how I did it. My first post covered publishing Zombie Turkeys, my first book. (Psst! If you want a free copy, go here. This link is only good for a limited time.)

You Can Publish 4 Books
Zombie Turkeys

I left off that post mentioning my second book, My Undead Mother-in-law. Here’s the story of that publication.

You Can Publish 4 Books
My Undead Mother-in-law

First, I didn’t take time off after Zombie Turkeys came out October, 2016. I entered November NaNoWriMo and wrote 50,000 words of MUM (as I like to abbreviate it.)

I finished up the book in January and sent the book to my editor, Dori Harrell, as with Zombie Turkeys. Then I contacted my illustrator Sean ‘Fuzzy’ Flanagan. He stressed the covers should look similar, so people can see this is a series. He created another fantastic cover.

Like before, the back cover is a scene from within the book. In this case, the first chapter family meal with the zombie family, the Newby’s and the normal inlaws. Did you notice the back cover is a parody? Compare it to this famous Norman Rockwell painting.

Freedom From Want by Norman Rockwell

Fuzzy also created unique chapter icons, like this next one:

MUM Chapter 1 Icon

You Can Publish 4 Books in 3 Years – The Process

At this point, I’m getting a rhythm to working with my editors and illustrator and Amazon. I used over a hundred step project plan for Zombie Turkeys. For you, I’ve boil it down to:

  1. Write as much as you can every day until you’re done with the first draft.
  2. Then edit your first draft. Remove all grammar and spelling errors. (I use the free version of Grammarly).
  3. Next, hire an editor. I hired Dori Harrell.
  4. Also get an illustrator, like Fuzzy Flanagan.
  5. Then you’ll need a book format editor like Rik Hall. He puts your final manuscript into a professional format for print and ebook publishing.
  6. Now you can upload your manuscript and cover to Kindle.
  7. Consider this optional step: print out an author copy to check. I did that with Zombie Turkeys, but not the other books.
  8. Finally, you can publish it. Plan a date two to four weeks in the future for time to generate buzz and interest.
  9. Don’t forget to hold a launch party on the day of your book’s availability. Choose a library or bookstore and advertise it. I also advertise online by creating a Facebook event for each book launch.
  10. You can now buy posters and promotional material for selling at book conventions.
  11. Finally, sell your book at conventions. I’ve gone to Chabanacon, PennedCon, Archon, and Quadcon.
  12. Start writing your next book

What’s Next? Last Notes

My goal is to publish a book every nine months. A successful author said he writes four per year in a series and releases them every month for four months. I may try that in the future.

Would you like that? How about if I wrote four volumes of my Secret Supers series and release them monthly? Would you like that? Let me know. I’ll send you a free short story for your response.

You Can Publish 4 Books
Secret Supers

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Science Chasing Fiction – Who Will Win?

Science Chasing Fiction – Who Will Win? That’s my question for you. Of course, you’ll say, ‘Science fiction will always be ahead of science.” I thought that too–before I read these articles. It seems science is getting closer and closer to fiction.

The first article:

How cool is this? We now have a new treatment for Alzheimer’s based upon electromagnets in a skull cap.

But wait–I just wrote a book with electronic skull caps for animals and people in My Undead Mother-in-law, published in 2017.

Science Chasing Fiction
My Undead Mother-in-law

Check out the metal skull caps or yarmulkes on the mamba, capuchin monkey, and rat in the following image:

Chapter 3 Icon
Science Chasing Fiction
Secret Supers

But wait–there’s more! I also have electromagnetic impulses causing brain changes in Secret Supers, my most recent novel.

I just published this in March 2019. But the next fact is creepier: in the book I’m currently writing, Oops: Tales from the Turkey Apocalypse, I have a short story called ‘Assisted Living’ where I reverse Alzheimer’s. I plan to publish it by Thanksgiving, but will it be science fact and not science fiction?

In any event, I’ll send you a free copy of the short story, just because you asked me!

Science Chasing Fiction – Your Second Example

Now take a gander at the next science article.

This news story covers artificial intelligence and how hard it is to analyze a successful neural network. Why does it work the way it does? No one knows. But I have AI in Paranormal Privateers, published in 2018. Read this following excerpt, quoting a sentient AI:

“We are not carbon-based life, silly human. We currently dwell as permanent Bose-Einstein electronic flows inside the quantum memories and processors in this miner. “

Paranormal Privateers, chapter 13, Area 52
Science Chasing Fiction
Chapter 13 Icon – Area 52

In this chapter, I have humanity run into an advanced alien AI based on neural networks in quantum computers.

The Final Usurpation of Fiction

In this case, science doesn’t anticipate my hamster story, ‘A Hamster’s Tale’. It’s Weird Al Yankovic who does that!

How does one write a science fiction tale about a hamster? Read and find out! You can read it here. The last chapter icon shows Dancer, the hamster hero of the story.

Science Chasing Fiction
Dancer from Epilogue Icon from Secret Supers