penfist

stories are the bones of everything

Pen

Dying doesn’t change our personality

by 1 Comment

The full quote goes:

Dying doesn’t change our personality, it intensifies it.

The quote comes from a woman named Barbara Karnes, author of Gone From My Sight.

The driving force in my life is the quest for wisdom. That often comes from reading and writing. Through those two closely aligned processes, data is refined into knowledge that can be further refined into encapsulated lessons that we humans call wisdom.

I see the above quote as belonging to that third category of information called wisdom. Once you get to the end, it’s too late to change anything. You had the whole journey to do that. At the end, you’re already everything you were ever going to be.

Except more.

So every day, I ask myself, what did I do today that will make my ending’s intensity more meaningful to anyone who happens to go on after I stop.

 

Ebook prices are a ripoff because publishers are greedy

by Leave a Comment

There are many reasons why I self-publish. Among them is the fact that I want my writing to be affordable to as wide a range of people as possible.

There’s an author I like reading by the name of Seth Godin.  Seth writes about differentiating yourself, standing out from the crowd, how technology can be an enabling force. Stuff like that. The first book I ever read from him Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?, changed my view on life and was part of what made me start writing full-time at 43.

The other day I decided it was time to pickup some more Seth Godin inspiration. I went to buy the Kindle version of his book Tribes: We Need you to Lead Us. Until I realized the ebook was more than the hard cover edition. I couldn’t believe it. This price gouging stuff has been going on since ebooks came on the market. There is absolutely no moral justification for it. Ebooks are cheaper to produce than their paper equivalent by several orders of magnitude.

I emailed Seth inquiring about why his ebooks are more than their paper cousins and got this reply:

Thanks Pen

I hear how frustrated you are. It’s logical to assume that authors have anything at all to do with Kindle prices, but of course, we don’t. Penguin is a giant corporation, and they set the prices, not me.

If it were up to me, I think I’d bring a different strategy go the table, but they’re not ready to change a company-wide policy at my suggestion.

Sorry for your disappointment in me.

I thought it was classy that Seth responded within an hour. However, and I say this gently, he can fire his publisher anytime. It’s hard to support authors who support the blatant price gouging of publishers like Penguin/Random House. I get that Seth needs to make a living. So do I.

There’s still no way it makes sense to charge $17 for an ebook. That’s a ripoff anyway you slice it.

I value my readers and thank each of you for every word of mine you’ve read. I encourage you to withdraw you support from authors who enable “agency pricing” that is designed solely to enhance big publishers bottom line. That only makes the work harder for people with smaller pockets to obtain. Information and stories should be affordable to everyone.

Sunflower man

by Leave a Comment

It wrecked me. Watching him.

He knew his purpose. I thought I knew mine.

Time has proven me wrong. Time has latched onto my brain and caused me to think about him. What was done to sunflower man. It’s wrong.

I had the might of an empire protecting me. How brittle that turned out to be.

He had his faith. Or many faiths. He watered every day. That was the thing he believed in most. His beneficiaries thrived because of the tender care he gave them.

Dust storms came. Bombs shook everything. The world turned orange. It turned loud. Nothing was certain during that year I spent in hell.

Except that he would find water and pour it out on those golden yellow survivors he created. They were never orange. Even during the hellish dust storms, if you got close enough, they remained bright yellow around the perimeter, with a dark brown center made of seeds. How beautiful.

Because. Sunflower man tended and gardened. In circumstances that would make most of us crumble into pieces.

I don’t know how he came up with the seeds, or the clay pots, or the soil. He just did. That earned my respect. And caused me to think of him. Almost a decade later, I remember his haunted face. Serene and dignified.

Imagine. Invaders coming to your metropolis. Or your rural farm. That part matters not. What matters is how you react when the reality you’ve known your whole life is taken away. Sunflower man. He knew what to do.

Give something life in the midst of hell. Pour the water out. Keep the pot tended carefully. Provide a stick to hold up the fragile nature of existence. I sometimes wonder where he is. Deep in dreams, I tremble and shake.

Shamed. By his bravery and my cowardice. While he grew life, I was a mouthpiece. While he carried nothing but a watering can and his resolve, I shook and cowered inside the latest technology. Body armor and a gun can never defeat a sunflower man.

I’ve learned my lessons the hard way. I hope you’ll hear his voice passed on through mine.

Perhaps I’ll recover a picture of sunflower man one day. If so, I hope to share it with you. He’s my idol. Far braver than most. Far more determined. Far less lucky.

All my respect is his.

 

Next year is going to be very different

by Leave a Comment

I’ve been mostly quiet in 2015. There are a variety of reasons for that. I’m not going to get into details. That’s not the point of this post. This post is, in military parlance, a warning order.

If you follow me on social media, subscribe to my newsletter, or are otherwise in contact with me, prepare yourself. I’ll lose a few of you in the coming year. It’s what happens when the volume gets turned up. I also intend to grow my audience by orders of magnitude.

Here’s how I am going to do it:

  • Share my original content here frequently
  • Share the most interesting, thought provoking, and horizon expanding content I come across often on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and other channels
  • Reach out more often to my fan base – expect random notes based on what I see you doing with your own personal brand.

I am making 2016 a year of explosive, positive growth. I hope you’ll join me. Maybe I can teach you a thing or two along the way. I know I’ll be pleasantly surprised by all the things you are going to teach me.

Please share the amazing stories and authors you find with me. Share the dreamers and the visionaries. Let’s build an awesome 2016 together.

Regards,

Pen

A year of biohacking

by Leave a Comment

Health is on my mind.

In 2016, I’ll be starting an experiment with ketogenic living. I’ve been biohacking for many years but haven’t done anything this extreme. My 2016 begins with the premise that everything I’ve been taught about eating healthy is wrong.

For the last decade, I’ve been operating on the theory my weight and health can be manipulated by counting calories. I was under the impression that if I ate too much, all I needed to do was exercise a bit more to burn off the extra calories. Seems like I may have been wrong. Apparently, the kind of calories I’m ingesting is much more important that how many calories I’m taking in.

I’ve recently been introduced to a guy named Gary Taubes. He pisses a lot of people off by theorizing that a high-fat, low-carb diet is the way to go.  That’s not what the medical authorities teach in the United States or Europe.

His books, Why We Get Fat and Good Calories, Bad Calories, convinced me that most of what I know about healthy eating is completely wrong. I think hundreds of millions of you might be in a similar situation.

The experiment begins on Jan. 1, 2016. If you follow me on social media, subscribe to my newsletter, or happen to be a part of my physical world, you’re going to be going along for the ride. If you’ve tried a ketogenic or some other low-carb diet, I want to hear from you.

Pain

by 3 Comments

“It hurts,” he screams. I want it to hurt. I turn the dial a little bit to the right. I took it. The dial I’m turning. From an old lady I killed. After it all went south. I got it off the record player on the shelf. Before I burned her and her house down to the ground.

Electricity is precious now. I use it to inflict the pain back into them. I like pissing it away. Into. The ones responsible for this nightmare that pretends to be life. I used to feel OK. That was a long time ago. Now I am haunted. And all of you are going to be haunted too. That thing you give me. Hopelessness. Endless torment. It’s coming back to eat you. I took the clay you gave me and wrapped it around myself as a shield. I’m invulnerable now. For a little while.

And I’m going to do every single person I can. Like I did that old lady. She pretended to be so sweet. But her teeth were rotten. Like the world. The one you were stupid enough to let me be born into.

Fuck you, mother. You gave me good grammar and a sense of overriding guilt. And not much else I can think of. So go fuck yourself. With those sharp fingernails you cultivated oh so carefully. That false piousness fooled no one.

He’s screaming again. Cursing me. I don’t have time to listen to this. Time to turn the dial a little further to the right.

It all flows how it’s supposed to. A teacher I had once told me that. It sort of stuck. All through everything falling apart. The world heated up. The oil ran out. The stocks went down. Inflation went up. You left and I started going crazy.

“It hurts,” he screams. Again. I turn the dial all the way up until he can’t scream anymore.

Now it’s my turn. But I’m quiet. I have a stockpile of pills that keep the screams away. For now. They’ll run out some day. My turn is coming.