The battle was fought for a little Pacific Island.
Iwo Jima…
Today is that anniversary. A good article with video is HERE.
Iwo Jima and Okinawa were the last two major land battles of WWII.
Hand Salute!
Ready, Two.
I REALLY wonder where some people learned how to drive…
Sigh…
I’m betting they never learned to color inside the lines either…
Of course the one on the right that started it had a DC plate, so no real surprise…
One year ago…
TL;DR version- I self-published The Grey Man- Vignettes
What brought me to that point? Well grab a cup of coffee and I’ll tell ya…
I write mostly on airplanes and in hotel rooms on the road, and weekends at home. It’s something to occupy me and keep me off the streets and out of trouble when I can’t get to the range. I’d written some short stuff and posted it here on occasion and a couple of loyal readers said I ought to write a book…
Since I can’t write about what I do (without going to jail for a LONG time), it was a case of finding something else to write about. Science fiction? Nah, too crowded. Horror? Nah, I’ll keep my nightmares to myself. Shooting? Hmmm, that might work…
And the OBTW is I just took myself out of the mass market for readers with that decision, but more on that later.
The genesis of TGM was really a couple of conversations down at Quantico when we were moving firing lines from 600 back to 1000 yards. Most of the folks who come out are pretty serious shooters, some still active duty, some retired and a few of us hangers on.
One of the first conversations was over the whole ‘operator’ meme that was going around, and the perception that only buffed out 6’3”, 200lb chunks of muscle with a weeks’ worth of beard growth were operators. One of the old retired shooters said something to the effect of, “I’ll let him start from a thousand with all his toys. I’ll sit here with Ol’ Betsy and five rounds and let’s see who wins.”
One of the young active duty guys started down the road of being in shape, and running etc. To which another one of the oldsters said sarcastically something to the effect of “That’s why I was a sniper, so I didn’t have to do that s**t.”
Another conversation surrounded challenge coins, and how they’ve proliferated over the years. Again one of the youngsters pulled out a coin and he was amazed at how many ‘old farts’ pulled out coins too.
The third conversation was in the pits during an F600 match, where we got to chatting about the camaraderie among the shooting sports, especially high power and long range. Everybody is a competitor, but at the same time everybody is willing to help someone else out, even down to loaning them a rifle or ammunition or (and that seems to populate across all the competitive levels)…
Those conversations and a bunch of what ifs became the challenge coin post and later chapter in the book. After I’d written it, I took it down to Quantico one Sunday and showed it to a few folks, and most of them died laughing, especially the older guys.
Then it became a process of actually developing the characters beyond one little short story. Being an old fart, I have a pretty wide range of acquaintances, so I ‘built’ composites of John and Jesse Cronin based on those people.
Setting it in Texas killed two birds with one stone, I knew the area, and it was a tribute to folks I knew in the area who had been or are LEOs.
I also reached out and asked questions. Yeah, surprised aren’t ya…
Larry Correia, Larry Lambert, JD Kinman, Peter Grant and Wing graciously shared advice throughout the process and wished me luck (which I would need).
One thing both Larry’s said that stuck with me was make the guns right. And if you’re doing shooting sequences make them believable. The deeper I got into TGM, the more research I did, the more I reached out to friends and fellow shooters, folks in the medical world and others. Each of them graciously gave of their time to set me straight, or to make me ‘prove’ what I was writing was correct (you know who you are).
I had finished the first draft in late 2013, and worked with another of my 5 loyal readers on a cover for the book. Tina did an outstanding job on it, taking my wild hair idea and turning it into what I think is an eye catching cover that matches the book’s tone well. I reached out again to friends and went through a series of alpha and beta readers and edits (Thanks for slogging through all my lousy punctuation and mis-spellings), and ‘I’ felt pretty good about the story. So I started submitting it… And getting rejection after rejection, after rejection. About 50 all told…
So why did I self publish? Basically one rejection that stated words to the effect that I didn’t have a mass market book, it was at best a niche market and the book was so poorly written that no one would read it IF I published it.
And then the fight started… 🙂
I reached out to Peter and Wing and they gave me great advice on going through Amazon’s process and in early March 2014, I published The Grey Man- Vignettes.
To say I was worried terrified scared s**tless was the understatement of the day! I’d spent a chunk of change to get the editing and other pieces done, and now I was putting myself out there for what? I had no clue… Ridicule? Very possible. Being laughed at? Probably. Nothing? Yeah, a strong possibility…
My ten loyal readers bought copies! Yea!!!
But I didn’t have an advertising budget, so the blog and friends who spread the word via their blogs were the sum total of the ‘advertising’ (thanks to those that stepped up and took a chance on me). I didn’t obsess over sales (well not too much anyway), it was going to be what it was. I just wanted to break even, that was pretty much my goal.
Larry L had told me to never read the reviews. So I pretty much didn’t other than seeing how many I had gotten. But I’ve to admit when I got the 1 star, I read that one…
The book actually took off a little bit, but what truly humbled me were the emails and positive comments I got from a number of readers. That led me to try to write a ‘real’ book, which lead to TGM- Payback.
I’ve sold over a thousand copies of Vignettes and it continues to trickle out today, so I did break even.
Thanks to those of you who have read it and told your friends or given away copies of it. And thanks too for the reviews you’ve posted on Amazon. If you have time, I’d appreciate reviews of either book. The more reviews, the better the chances somebody will read them and decide to take a chance on my little niche book.
I’m wrapping up the first draft of the third book in the series, it will be The Grey Man- Changes. It will probably go live around mid-summer.
Thank You.
Comfort food!
Growing up, a ‘comfort food’ was my grandma’s biscuits. I always remember there being a plate of them in the bread box. I was allowed two, and ONLY two.
She’d split them and butter them and I was then allowed to take a teaspoon and dip it in the tin of black strap Molasses that always sat on the table.
One dip per biscuit, and I could dribble it around any way I wanted. After I’d done both biscuits I was allowed to lick the spoon then put it in the sink.
Only then was I actually allowed to eat my biscuits…
Similar memories? Different foods?
Windoze is FINALLY going to kill Internet Exploder…
Couldn’t happen soon enough for those of us who aren’t allowed by company policy to run any other browsers…
Woo Hoo!!!
This from Digital Trends on Fox HERE.
Doing the happy dance… Of course I’ll probably be retired before this actually happens, but in the long run this is nothing but GOOD for the folks that are stuck with IE and whatever they call the new one, hopefully it will be better and actually work.
In other news, I heard on the radio that Apple is now talking about ‘buying’ Android and RIM (Blackberry) devices on trade in like they do iPhones. Apple has finally realized they’ve missed the boat on the buybacks, even if they throw them away or donate them to… OH wait, Obummerphones are iPhones you get for free… Never mind…
I’m really thinking about taking my donut to the meeting today. 8 hours in a lousy chair is NOT going to be fun today. I’ll just apologize ahead of time for the lack of commenting today, as I know I won’t get back till late.
It’s going to be one of THOSE weeks…
This one has resided for years on the break room bulletin board, and it’s STILL true…
I know this is a case of the pot calling the kettle black, but dammit, WHY don’t folks actually READ what they put in white papers BEFORE they submit it? Cutting and pasting is a time saver, no question. But there ‘should’ be at least a passing continuity between paragraphs. And maybe even between pages???
Sigh…
And tomorrow is another offsite for 8 (yeah, right) hours… I”ve got 10 in the pool…
But at least it’s not raining, or snowing, and I’m not freezing my ass off.
- The first piece of luggage on the carousel never belongs to anyone.
- I have kleptomania, but when it gets bad, I take something for it.
- A computer once beat me at chess but it was no match for me at kickboxing.
- Lawyers believe a man is innocent until he is proven broke.
- A gun is like a parachute. If you need one, and don’t have one, you’ll probably never need one again.”
- The quickest way to double your money is to fold it and put it back in your pocket.
- There are two theories to arguing with a woman. Neither works.
- I started out with nothing and I still have most of it.
- Just because you’ve always done it that way doesn’t mean it’s not incredibly stupid.
- If at first you don’t succeed, better refer to it as a learning experience instead of a failure.
- Letting the cat out of the bag is a whole lot easier than putting it back.
- The older we get, the fewer things seem worth waiting in line for.
- I don’t know how I got over the hill without getting to the top.
- You are not stupid, I just think you have bad luck when thinking.
- You can’t un-ring a bell.
- The two most useless things in flying are altitude above you and runway behind you.
- Half the lies they tell about me aren’t true.
- Always go to other people’s funerals, otherwise they won’t come to yours.
- When a man opens a car door for his wife, it’s either a new car or a new wife.
- The only reason they say “women and children first” is to check the strength of the lifeboats.
I made a mistake this morning and slept in…
By the time I got to the range it was a three hour wait. Seems like everybody and their brother decided to get out and shoot this morning…
The rifle range was ‘guesstimating’ a two hour wait, and people were already bitching about the wind. I was going to do some sighting in with the ARs, but that would be useless in the wind, so I turned around and came home.
That was two hours wasted… Sigh…
In other news, I got this one from JP, and although it’s been around before, it does strike a chord, having grown up in the South.
Rattlesnake Logic….
After the Boston bombing the news media spent days and weeks trying to determine why these men did what they did. They want to know what America did to make these brothers so angry with us. They want to know why these men were not arrested before they did something so terrible. The media is in a tizzy about this new era of homegrown radicals and about why and how they can live among us and still hate us.
“Here in Arizona, I have rattlesnakes on my place, living among us. I have killed a rattlesnake on the front porch. I have killed a rattlesnake on the back porch. I have killed rattlesnakes in the barn, in the shop and on the driveway.
In fact, I kill every rattlesnake I encounter. I kill rattlesnakes because I know a rattlesnake will bite me and inject me with poison. I don’t stop to wonder WHY a rattlesnake will bite me; I know it WILL bite me because it’s a damned rattlesnake and that’s what rattlesnakes do.
I don’t try to reason with a rattlesnake or have a “meaningful dialogue” with it I just kill it.
I don’t try to get to know the rattlesnake better so I can find a way to live with the rattlesnakes and convince them not to bite me. I just kill them.
I don’t quiz a rattlesnake to see if I can find out where the other snakes are, because (a) it won’t tell me and (b) I already know they live on my place. So, I just kill the rattlesnake and move on to the next one.
I don’t look for ways I might be able to change the rattlesnake to a non-poisonous rat snake… I just kill it.
I know for every rattlesnake I kill, two more are lurking out there in the brush. In my lifetime I will never be able to rid my place of rattlesnakes.
Do I fear them? Not really. Do I respect what they can do to me and my family? Yes!! And because of that respect, I give them the fair justice they deserve…. Then I kill them…
As a country, we should start giving more thought to the fact that these jihadists’ are telling the world their goal is to kill Americans and destroy our way of life. They have just posted two graphic videos on the internet showing them beheading Americans and just recently burned a Jordanian pilot alive. They are serious enemies.
Barbarians! They are exactly like rattlesnakes. It is high time for us to start acting accordingly!
I love this country. It’s the government I’m becoming more and more afraid of…
Hopefully by the time you read this, I’ll be at the range…
Go read the folks on the sidebar! They’re better than I am.
Well, well, well…
Seems the ATF and the administration are upping the ante on 5.56 ammo…
In a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing, ATF Director B. Todd Jones said all types of the 5.56 military-style ammo used by shooters pose a threat to police as more people buy the AR-15-style pistols.
From the Washington Examiner, HERE. And the video is pretty good too…
The Civilian Marksmanship Program – successor to the Army’s former Director of Civilian Marksmanship used to be the go to place for MILSURP ammo. Of more than two dozen rounds listed for various rifles that could be used in “service match” competition, the only one qualifying as military surplus today is Greek .30-06 M2 Ball….
And the Dems are stepping up to the third rail (again)…
Congressional Democrats are urging the director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to use his “existing authority” to keep “dangerous ammunition [sic] out of our communities.” “We hope that the Bureau will swiftly review comments on the proposed framework and issue a revised proposal that will address the danger posed by handguns that fire 5.56mm and other rifle ammunition” (bold is mine).
This is from The Hill online, HERE.
What worries me is those last three words… Look at the barrels one can get for a Thompson Contender set up and just think about that…
In other news, (spit) BO went on Jimmy Kimmel to finally say ‘something’ about the police getting shot in Ferguson! Really???
And I just want to know what all those protesters that are out there at midnight or one or two in the morning do for a living???
IF I were in charge of Ferguson, I’d disestablish the police department, lock the doors to city hall, throw away the key and walk away… Let them see how they like anarchy there…
And I’ll admit I’m dumb, but I don’t see how Holder can get away with what he’s doing to Ferguson! 45 agents tore the town apart, and STILL couldn’t indict a single officer, or anybody else. But the report(s), leaks, etc. seem to filled with innuendo and not a lot of facts. And I didn’t see any real comparisons of arrest rates, crime rates etc. broken out by black and white… Much less compared to other cities.
See if Nixon would actually call out the National Guard or let it burn… Speaking of Nixon, he’s been totally absent from the scene on this go-round… Guess he’s not getting talking points from BO, or he’s been told to lay low…