Keith Graham

I published Space, Time and Other Dimensions a couple of weeks ago. I set the Kindle version to go on a free promotion for the three days on December 23, 24, and 25. This way I could take advantage of people at home during Christmas.

Why would I want to give away my book for free? The answer is that I wanted to make it into one of Amazon’s Best-Seller lists. It worked. My book made it to #3 in Kindle Science Fiction Anthologies. It was also in the top ten for Kindle Hard Science Fiction and Kindle Cyberpunk. As a result, I made about $20 in sales and got lots of interest in the book.

Today is Boxing Day, and the book is no longer free. It has dropped to about 1,000 in the lists. I hope that enough free versions have been delivered that it will create interest, and maybe get a few reviews.

This is how you game Kindle KDP. I will let you know next month if it was worth it.

Three years ago, I had a series of seizures and had to be heavily medicated. Nobody was able to figure out why I had these seizures. Every doctor that I talked to told me variations on “Damned if I know”. My diagnosis was “Partial Complex Seizure Disorder”, which is a catchall for seizures that can’t be localized or explained by injury or tumor. My brain is clear, so I just have seizures for some reason which cannot be pinpointed.

The good news is that I haven’t had a seizure since I’ve been taking my pills. The bad news is that seizure medication works by slowing down your brain’s reaction time. I was severely slowed down. I had short term memory loss, “tip of the tongue” syndrome, and I have lost about 30 or 40 IQ points. I can’t write programs. I can’t write stories. I fell down the stairs several times and trip over things, all the time.

I have nagged my Neurologist to find me a medication that lets me function the way that I used to. I have been taking a pill, now, for about a year, that is pretty good. I have been slowly and carefully experimenting with reducing my dosage. The doctors don’t like me doing this, but I can’t stand the status quo. I am down to a little over half of the recommended dosage.

Before I had the seizures, I would have occasional feelings of a loss of the moment. I would suddenly realize that, for the last minute, I had lost all thought. This is what I think is a mini-seizure, and a precursor to a full-fledged flop around on the floor seizure. Since I have been reducing my dosage, I have not had any indication or any clue of a problem.

Today, I feel good. I have started writing again. The other day, I wrote a computer program. I reconfigured my home Web Servers, which is not a trivial task. I think that the old Keith is mostly back.

I started working on my two unfinished novels. I have finished three short stories. They aren’t great, but they aren’t half bad.

I reworked and republished my Anthologies. I put together a new collection of short stories with 18 stories and published on Amazon.

I have been practicing playing harmonica and I think I am getting much better.

Wish me luck.

I’ve been working on a new collection of stories called Space, Time and Other Dimensions. I was saving my Classic Hard Science Fiction stories for this collection. I only had 15 stories, so I’ve been writing a little. Since I have dozens of stories that I have started but never finished, I found a couple of these that looked promising. I finished them and included them in the book.

I am not real happy with the way they turned out, but they are decent enough. I’d like to finish a couple of more.

I’ve already published a version of Space, Time and Other Dimensions. The Kindle version actually sold a little. It did well, for a moment. The book was #16 in new Kindle Science Fiction. It was 240th overall in Kindle Science Fiction sales. This was quick, though. I haven’t had any sales for a few days, now, so I don’t believe it will do very well in the future. None of my other books have sold in a long time.

There seems to be an issue here with someone uploading a Trojan to my websites. My virus software catches it immediately, but it is annoying. I wish there was a way to find out which page is doing it. This blog is the primary suspect, so I am considering ways to turn this site to 100% static.

I use FlatPress to publish these pages, but it is not static. Flatpress creates the pages, but then it uses another PHP program to present them.

I need to do some more investigating, but I don’t want to learn a new language to do it.

I upgraded my Wamp server and I find that the code that I have been using is full of problems with “Deprecation” errors.

I had to do some quick lookups and some global changes, and it is fixed. I have to keep testing, but I think I got it.

So if you haven’t been able to read this blog in the last few days, now you know why.