How to Build a Bass Guitar

Or how I did it at least. I play bass as a hobby, been doing it for years. I also like to build things, and I saw this DIY Steinberger clone kit to build your own bass guitar. So I figured, why not? I'd been thinking of buying a Steinberger Spirit bass, because they're smaller and easier to travel on airplanes with, but no one around here sells 'em.

So I bought the kit and built my own. Took me three weeks or so, because of paint curing and finish curing times. I wrote up the steps and put a few pictures of the finished product at the bottom of the page here:

Link > How to Build a Bass Guitar

Think I'll do a P-bass next. But I might do that without a kit, see as everyone who sells kits are out of stock.

A little comment about something in the story...

In the new book, there's a spot where Will is accosted by the equivalent of the Coast Guard and asked just how he ended up where he is, so he spins them a little story about a rich woman that he heard from a friend. Well, I'm here to say that the story is true.

It really happened. Not to me, but to a friend of mine's brother. He got picked up by a rich woman, who made him all sorts of promises, and then took him traveling with her for several months. She pretty much made him her sexual plaything. Then he wakes up one morning at a very expensive hotel in Florida, all the way across the US from where he started in the Midwest, she's gone (she snuck out earlier) and left HIM stuck with the bill for the hotel. Which he couldn't pay of course, it was a lot of money, and he's got nothing on him as up until now she's been paying for everything.

So he ended up working at the hotel for many months to first pay the bill off (this was in the early 1980's), then to save up enough money so he could travel back home.

He said it was worth it.

On Sale, Friday, March 23rd, POI #8: The Seven Worlds

It's in pre-order now, and goes live this Friday:

Coming Soon

Should be up for pre-order soon.

Book Three in the Days of Future Past is now an audiobook!

So the third book in the Days of Future Past trilogy, 'Future Tense' is now live on audible, Amazon and iTunes. For those of you who have been waiting for it, the wait is over:

Future Tense on Audible

Here's the link from Amazon:

The Valens Legacy Audiobook is out!

For all of you who have been waiting for the audio version of the Valens Legacys series, the first two books are now available on Aubible:

The Valens Legacy

Here's the cover:

Just a general Update and POI #8 Status

So, I realized this morning that I hadn't posted here in a while. So I figured I'd make a general update. POI #8 (working title: On The Border) is currently being written. I'd hoped to have the first draft completed last week, but I had outpatient surgery last Tuesday and I ended up getting very little work done after that. So I'm hoping to be first draft complete by the end of this week. I don't have a target date on release for that one yet, it will be sometime this month.

On the Valens Legacy. I'd hoped to start writing that this week, but odds are that won't happen until next week. I'm still hoping to get that out by the end of this month, but with losing a week that may slip a little.

Black Friday was nominated for an 'Ursa Major Award' so if you want to go vote for me, (or rather Jan Stryvant) I'd appreciate it. True it's not a big award, but I've never gotten an award for writing before.

So that's where things stand currently. Hopefully I'll have some more interesting stuff for you soon.

Hard to believe that these are live pictures

New Valens Legacy book, now live

The new Valens Legacy book: Stand On It is now available on Amazon:


Stand On It

A Few Words on Page Count

A few words on 'page count'.

Page count, the number of pages in a paperback book, is not really much of an indication of just how many words are in a novel. For example, I have one series where I formatted the books at 6x9 and another done at 5x8. Mass-market paperbacks are at I think 4x7.

The difference in the amount of words you can put on a page between just 6x9 and 5x8 is fairly significant, and that doesn't even begin to take into account the size of the gutter (space between the text and the spine) the outside margin and the top and bottom margins. Then, on top of that you have font size and font style. I have seen mass-market paperbacks where the publisher used an 18-point font in order to increase page count, to make a novella look like a novel, or a short novel look like a longer one.

Now for POD (Print on Demand) books, page count is the primary factor in determining the price of your product. So if you want to be competitive with mass-market paperbacks, you need to get the number of pages in your book down. It's as simple as that. So you go for the 6x9 format, you shrink your gutter and your margins, you go with a smaller font size and say a font like Georgia instead of Times New Roman. To make my novel 'Children of Steel' saleable, I had to shrink the font down to a ten-point and squash the margins as much as possible. The book is still very fat in the 6x9 format even after doing all of that, but it let me sell it at 10.99 and still make a quarter (as in 25 cents) on each print sale.

On some of my more recent stories I did similar stuff to keep the page count low. Sure, I could easily push all of them over two hundred, or even three hundred pages, but then I start pricing myself out of competition. People forget that it's how many words are in a book, not how many pages. Words per page can easily vary from two hundred to four hundred fifty, or more.

It's all in the formatting.

What I'm reading

I just started reading 'Lion's Quest: Undefeated' by Michael-Scott Earle. Wow, this is an amazing book. I'm about 2/3rds through it. If you haven't read it, I'd say to give it a look.

Lion's Quest: Undefeated

I honestly don't get to read enough, too busy working. There's a bunch of books I need to finish, along with book 2 in 'Super Sales on Super Heroes' which so far has also been a lot of fun. There really are a lot of good books out there these days.

The new book has been uploaded and should be available later tonight

Okay, I put the book up with Amazon about an hour and a half ago. The status is publishing, which means I have a possible link for it, BUT until it's actually published, that link won't do anything.

So, here's the link, right now it'll tell you that it can't be found, but hopefully in a few hours that'll change. It'll definitely be live by tomorrow.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B078RGJ2PY


Again, right now you just get a 'Sorry' page.

Here's the cover, it came out a little more 'fan servicey' than I intended, but unless I hear lots of complaints, I'm gonna stick with it. In my defense I had the flu when I ordered it, and that's my story and I'm sticking to it! :-)