There are four types of fiction books as far their usefulness for my writing goes.

There are books that I am perfectly comfortable with. They don’t challenge me in any way, hit all the necessary tropes, and pass through my head and into oblivion without catching on anything. A Talent for War by Jack McDevit was the most recent one I read: comfortable science-fiction that has just enough spice to it to keep things exciting. These books are fun but useless: they don’t add anything to my style or stories.

Then there are books that I find boring. They aren’t always bad books, sometimes they are objectively genius: for example, A Song of Ice and Fire. I like two characters (Arya and Tyrion), but the rest can go to hell or take a vacation on Dragon Rock or go dance with the White Walkers. I simply don’t care, so I don’t read their chapters (sacrilege, I know). From the first day of school, everyone knows that boring learning materials are the worst if you want to take away something from the lessons. So those books are useless too.

To the Lighthouse is weird, or perhaps I am separated from it by too much time, born so long after it was written in 1927.

Virginia Woolf writes in a flowery language, and the thought runs like a brook in a forest: twisting its way around rocks and hiding from time to time only to emerge twenty feet farther jumping between characters when paragraphs end. It is a style we don’t see much anymore. It reminded me of Dostoevsky and a bit of Tolstoy (though they have the good manners to stick to one character throughout a chapter), and I can’t say that I enjoy reading either of those authors. But To the Lighthouse is a good book, and I like it.

Part of the reason for my liking it is that To the Lighthouse is of the rare slice of life genre. I don’t see it often in Western literature, whether contemporary or classic. It’s not a biography as such, and it has no plot. It’s just a story of a family—the Ramsays—and some things that happen to them and what they do over a dozen years. The story shows the importance of point of view, and captures brilliantly the wandering of human thought. It reminded me of the Japanese authors I love, and it was a pleasant discovery. I feel like this insight into the human mind is the only strong point of the book, but the intuition is deep and still relevant (despite some dated notions, especially about the sexes), and reading it has certainly taught me something I can’t express with words.

Turns out that Beware of Light doesn't sell many copies not because it sucks (which it doesn't–I have it on good authority), but because everything I've done during and since launch was wrong. Huge thanks to Mark Dawson for teaching newbie authors like me what's what in this business.

So I have until May (when I can escape KDP Select) to fix all the marketing stuff surrounding the book and myself, and hopefully I'll be able to pick up more readers by then. Anyway, starting with June I should have options available that will let me use unholy magic to summon a couple thousand readers. We'll see how it goes.

When you rewrite something important, like the executive summary of your paper or the first page of my book, my advice is not to look at the version you have.

Give yourself a week, forget what you have there, and just start from scratch. Otherwise you will subconsciously pull your new text to what you already have, and it can make it a waste of time.

They tell you to be authentic on the internet. And by they I mean friendly, charming, slightly quirky people.

Sure. If you are a nice person, and you need to get over your shyness to let other people bathe in the warmth of your presence, then it's a good idea. But hell if it's for everyone.

Half the time, my issues have issues. I am not a pleasant person to be around, or at least I believe so, and even if outside of my head I'm the greatest guy in the world, screw it, because I live inside my head, and piling my crap onto other people's plates brings such guilt that all the authenticity in the world can go and screw itself with an industrial drill.