Why did humans evolve self pity?

A thought occured to me just now. What is the evolutionary purpose of the emotion of self pity? I understand why an individual might benefit from some negative emotions like fear and anger. These get you out of danger or bring the danger to a deserving rival.

But I don't readily see a survival advantage to self pity or really any type of depression. How is wallowing in your own misery supposed to help you survive or get laid? Maybe it works in tandem with other human emotions like empathy and nurturing. "Oh, I feel so bad for you, here's some mutton and would you like to go lay down with me in the deer skin?"

Seems like a stretch though.

New Cover Art for my Kindle Book

My niece, a gifted designer, has generously offered to re-design my book cover. Here are the options (giant pics so you'll have to scroll down):

Original:

Option #1

Option #2

Option #3

Option # 4

Option #5

Option #6

Option # 7

Option # 8

Option # 9

Option # 10

Get good cheap Kindle books

I was wondering how I could create a "recession kindle book list" of kindle books that are both high quality and cheap. The way I wanted to do this was to browse by genre, price, and ratings; however, using the regular Amazon search, I could not do a compound search like this. I could either sort by price or by rating but not both.

Well here comes jungle-search.com! Strangely, this website offers a more powerful way to search Amazon than Amazon itself. In this search, you can specify a price range, a rating range, and a genre and get your ready-made list! Here's a list for Science fiction that is between $0.0 and $0.99 and has a five star rating. What could be better than a great book that's free (or nearly free)?

Shameless plug: I was gratified to see my MetaGame novel in the list. (:

Publishing a Kindle Book

I sent out my novel MetaGame out to a few publishers but it will be months before I hear from them, if ever. And so being impatient to get the book into reader hands, even if only a few, I decided to publish the book as a Kindle ebook.

The beauty of this is that it's free for the author, is relatively painless to do, and gets your book into the Kindle store for people to buy. Anyone can publish a kindle book. If you have text that you think is worth paying for, from a short story about your creepy uncle to a "how-to" article on collecting fat porcelain dolls, you can publish that puppy on Kindle! It will take you an hour or two to do it and you can get going here.

You decide how much to charge for your content. Anything from $0.99 to $200. I tried to give my book away for free but Amazon.com (who owns Kindle and the Kindle store) required a minimum charge of $0.99. This makes sense since Amazon take 65% of the proceeds and 65% of nothing is, of course, still nothing. Not to say that there aren't some free books in the Kindle Store but these seem to be largely coming from publishers who want to promote a series of books by giving one of them away for free. These publishers seem to be making some backdoor deal with Amazon to get the book up there free.

Anyway, I charged the lowest I could which was $0.99.

If you plan to publish on Kindle, a few notes from my experience:

• It takes days for your book to fully integrate into the Kindle store. You may get a message saying it will take an hour or two for your book to go live. Yes, it's true that it takes that long for it to be available to purchase but it takes days (up to a month in one case I heard of) to get everything up including your book description as well as your book being indexed into their search engine. Bottom line is that the Kindle ebook submission software is flaky so don't panic. It will work itself out eventually… Hopefully.
  
• Just because your book is up there doesn't mean anyone will find it. You are still on the hook for promoting your book. I tried to find my book by just browsing through the genre and could not find it. The only way I could find my book at all was to search on the exact title "MetaGame" or my full name, both of which are very improbable search terms. Despite this, I've been getting about a sale a day since I published it a few days back. I have no idea how this trickle of sales is happening.
  
• Test the crap out of your ebook before and after you publish. There is a Kindle simulator that you can use to test before you publish. I don't own a Kindle so after I published, I asked a friend who had an IPhone to buy the Kindle book so I could test it. In addition to the Kindle, you can read Kindle books on an IPhone once you've downloaded the Kindle Reader IPhone application.
  
• Search the Kindle publisher forums. They're actually pretty good and the community is quite active.

A newbie author tries to publish a novel (part 1)

So I just completed my first novel and, like everyone who has accomplished this herculean task (many), I want to publish it. Needless to say, the writing is fun and easy compared to me, an unknown author trying to publish their first novel. I thought I'd try to be systematic about it.

• Research publishers that are both interested in my genre (sci-fi) and willing to read manuscripts from unpublished authors without agents.
  
• Of these, identify the ones that don't require the entire book at once and "get the ball rolling" by sending them the first three chapters, synopsis, cover letter, etc even before I was completely done writing. In general, publishers don't like this, they expect the novel to be complete before you come to them.
  
• When finished with the novel, send it to the other publishers that require the whole manuscript at once.
  

I didn't bother with trying to find an agent at this point because I was under the impression that agents are uninterested in you unless you've sold books before or at least have a contract in hand with a publisher. This isn't necessarily true, but more on that later.

Well, theory rarely follows practice and so before finishing it, I ended up only sending it to one publisher when, if I was being more aggressive on the marketing angle, I would have hit several. For this one, my scheme worked in that I got a response just as I was approaching the finish line on the novel. They said they wanted to see the next four chapters (chapters 4-7).

I was so excited! My first submission and I got a nibble. In fishing, a nibble is a long way from catching a fish, but it's encouraging just the same and so I was pretty pumped. My optimism was somewhat dampened by the fact that they only wanted to see the next four chapters versus the whole thing, but I didn't ask questions. I just did what I was told. Through email, the editor said she was looking forward to reading the next four chapters, she emailed me to tell me when she got it, everything seemed like it was running on track.

And then nothing.

Seven weeks later I emailed the editor asking if they were still interested because if not, I wanted to send the manuscript to other publishers.

Nothing!

Come on! I realize that editors are inundated with manuscripts and that they don't have time to treat everyone with the highest level of care, but you can send a damn email back! All I wanted was a rejection letter, but apparently pasting a boilerplate rejection into an email and pressing the send button was too much trouble.

Again, I realize the publishing industry is callous and so I half expected this treatment for an unsolicited manuscript, but this second set of chapters was
requested by the publisher. I spent a hours reformatting my content to their specifications, printing it, and sending it off from the post office and the editor can't even press the "send" button?

Anyway, I'm going to have to toughen up. J.K Rowling even got rejected multiple times and probably dealt with her share of discourtesy. More posts to follow.

Writing

BTW, if you've somehow stumbled upon this blog, realize that it's not meant for public consumption. This is pretty much just a place for me to ramble and possibly take notes on my life.

So about writing.

I'd really like to be a professional writer but that's essentially impossible for practical people like me so I guess I'd settle for writing as a hobby.

Ok, so what do I write about? Current events? Fiction? Suspense? Pulp Horror? Real-life animal stories?

What does hobby writing involve? I want to write stuff that's fun to write and might give some meaning, at least to myself.

Here are a few ideas I've had:
- Wierd cyber romance where a man impersonates a woman on MySpace type software and to keep the charade going he has to enlist the help of a real woman who he eventually falls in love with. Truth is I can't write a romance so it'd have to be more than that. Maybe a commentary on our crazy contemporary world? Suspense? Danger? Does someone he dupped get pissed off and try to kill him?
- Dream world where kids get sucked in and go on crazy (dreams are crazy right?) adventures.
- Rants and raves of my opinion on things. Like one for every day of the year. I could collect them until I have a years worth! (: Call it the "Book of Rants".
- Sci fi book about an "illusionist" who takes a halucinary drug to better help him learn his craft and learns a painful lesson about impossible love.

Ok, let's say I picked one of these. How would I actually go about writing it?
- Write out an outline
- Flesh out some scenes.
- Put it together.

Names

First blog post should be about introductions.

The name of this blog ("A Day in the Life") is after the best Beattles song ever.

The URL "musterbator" is from term that describes someone who constantly thinks they "must" do this or "must" do that - a "musterbator". It's stupid and funny and that's what makes a good url... Also, I knew it wouldn't be taken.