Out Now: Crusaders of the Chrono-Crystal

The Kindle ebook of my novel is available here. You don't need a Kindle device to read it, you just need to download the app. Paperback and hardcover options should be available within a few days. Setting up the ebook was super easy, barely an inconvenience, but sizing and formatting the covers for physical printing has been a long ordeal that's left me feeling like Hitler in that movie clip where he goes ballistic. I can only hope it's over now. The Kindle version is much cheaper, but will get me more money per sale due to the absence of printing costs. I'm going to charge $24.99 for the paperback version, and if anyone buys it, I'll get less than a fifth of that. Of course I need to get enough sales that the amounts don't matter.

This novel goes back over eighteen years, all the way back to the daydreams I had in seventh grade study hall after seeing what was then the last Star Wars movie ever and reading Splinter of the Mind's Eye, the first Star Wars Expanded Universe book ever. These daydreams eventually became an attempt at a book, and then another attempt at a book, and then another attempt at a book. I've started many books. The last attempt, in the summer of 2010, was two pages long when I gave up on it. The next year I came home from college for winter break and found it on the computer. At that time, I felt inspired due to recently discovering several sci-fi abandonware games from the early nineties, so I got back to work on it, and I kept working on it off and on until the summer of 2013, when it became my first finished book. Then I just had to revise it several times until it was perfect. Then this past summer I became so frustrated at entering my second year as a bleeping substitute teacher with a bleeping Master's degree that I decided to stop procrastinating on my dreams, and I gave myself a deadline when I would have to decide it's good enough and put it out there. I chose December 15, 2153 because that's the anniversary of me discovering those old games and also 130 years before the book takes place. I'm obsessed with dates and anniversaries. So here it is. By self-publishing, I've avoided all the rejection and arguing over creative choices.

Today's Cache Valley Unitarian Universalist service was a celebration of the winter solstice, with the lights down and the curtains drawn until the very end, and candles and chanting. It was the most spiritual I've felt in a while. Spiritual feelings don't come easily to me. I've been looking forward to the solstice so that it will be over and the days will start getting longer again, but just celebrating it for the sake of itself was a nice perspective shift. Every week CVUU also does "Joys and Sorrows," where people are encouraged to light a candle and share a joy or a sorrow with the group. Today I shared my joy, and people were really happy for me, and it felt wonderful. Alluding back to a recent service on the topic of book-banning, I told them that if they want to support me, they should challenge my book and try to get it banned so I can get free publicity. They laughed, and it felt wonderful.

I really don't have any publicity since I'm self-publishing. My original plan to build up a large following on my blog and then tell everyone to buy my books never panned out, and every social media algorithm seems hell-bent on keeping me invisible. But I honestly think my book is so funny that it could become a success through word-of-mouth. That's its greatest strength by far. I didn't set out to write a comedy, I just wrote the kind of thing I would want to read, which happened to be something very funny. That's not conceited. It's just a fact. If you don't find it funny, you should see a doctor to make sure you aren't clinically dead.