All right, listen up. Are you sitting down? Good. Here we go. As I just announced on my main blog, dedoimedo.com, I am running a discounted sale for all of the books I’ve published through Smashwords. From December 12 through the end of the year, you can grab a bunch of fiction and nonfiction works. These include the four volumes in The Lost Words fantasy series, and please note the first book, The Betrayed is FREE (zero cost), my mythological novel I Shall Slay the Dragon!, and the recently published How to Make Your Career Suck Less, your one-stop shop to reducing work-related suffering.
I did it. The brand new (yet old) 63-chapter, 160,000-word fantasy book featuring magic, dragons, wizards, gritty heroes, and lots and lots of lore is done. I finished the project within roughly six months of leisurely writing (for the most part), give or take a few weeks. On its own, this wouldn’t be a major feat, except … I have tried to “rewrite” this idea three times already, unsuccessfully. But now, I finally succeeded.
If you don’t follow my main blog, dedoimedo.com, here’s a wee announcement. Black Friday. Cyber Monday. Yup. This coming long weekend, tens of millions of Americans will be forced to endure the company of their in-laws and awkward cousins over Thanksgiving family gatherings. I would like to help them, and what better way to avoid social unpleasantries than a good reading! My book, How to Make Your Career Suck Less, will be offered at a discount, from the Draft2Digital chain of stores. To wit, the universal book link, at your disposal.
It’s happening. I’m very close to finishing the new old fantasy book! After twenty years and two failed rewrite attempts, this third endeavor is finally bearing fruit. I found the right formula. Rather than trying to fix the old, clunky, ponderous manuscript, I’m writing a brand new book, with brand new words. Only the original idea (mostly) remains the same. In fact, even though this book will “only” stretch some 150,000 words, less than a quarter of the original version of mine, it’s still more fun, has more detail, more character development, better pacing, better everything.
Hear, hear! I am happy to announce the publication of my latest nonfiction, tech-related book. It comes with a snarky title How to Make Your Career Suck Less. Or, in other words, A Guide to a Less Painful IT Existence. This book is a culmination of some twenty years of my fairly successful work in the tech industry, where I’ve faced many an absurd situation, hordes of yesmen, tons of bureaucracy, and heaps of nonsense. And I bet, if you work in the tech space, you’ve experienced it all, too.
Hello hello there, dear readers. Today, I have something rather neat to show you. Fresh off the press, a brand new cover design for my upcoming career-focused book, apty titled How to Make Your Career Suck Less. The anti-hero book has an anti-hero cover. Cheeky, in your face, all that.
When it rains, it pours, or something. If you recall, less than a month back, I told you about my new fantasy work. Well, new old, so to speak. I’m writing from scratch a book that I’ve already written, more than 20 years back. Now, the idea is jolly solid, only the original volume is a ponderous 630,000-word colossus that simply isn’t fun enough. Fixing it turned out to be an impossible task. So I set about writing a brand new book, reusing the core story concepts. This has been going brilliantly. I’m already 35% done, some 60K works so far.
Between 1997 and 2001, throughout my military service, I wrote my first proper fantasy book. It was a hefty effort, 630,000 words in total. The book had everything: magic, monsters, lore, epicness, colorful protagonists. Only I never published it. Simply put, I tried sending it to various agents and publication houses, and they all turned it down. Rightfully so, because it wasn’t very good. In fact, it was pretty bad.
Once upon a time, you were young, you had dreams, hopes, high ambitions. You wanted a career in tech, you wanted to make a difference. You thought that you could achieve it all by being a team player, listening to your manager, hunkering down, working hard … Oh you sweet summer child.
Image taken from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 International.
How to Make Your Career Suck Less is my upcoming anti-hero book slash guide that aims to provide the reader – the disenchanted reader, the disillusioned techie, YOU – with practical tips and tricks, honest down-to-earth advice, and tangible suggestions on how to navigate the perilious waters of the modern tech world.
In this book, I strive to answer questions, dilemmas and conundra like how to handle micro-managers, how to create your first open-source project, your first conference, your first big project, how to write a practical and useful CV, and then some. What to do, and what not to do. How to be sarcastic, a dinosaur, and yet happy and successful.
As always, you’ll get the usual dose of tongue-in-cheek curmudgeony Dedoimedo philosophy, the stuff you’ve learned to (hopefully) love and appreciate over the years. The book should hit the store shelves end of summer, early autumn. If you’d like to be an early reviewer, ping me.
Dear readers, it’s been a while since I posted an article here. The astute among thee may wonder why so, and also remember my book plan for 2022, which, so far, does not seem to be progressing according to plan [sic]. Well, my big intention was to bundle The Golden Horde weekly serial into a proper paperback volume and (re)-release it on Amazon. But then 2022 happened. War. And what do you do when your book theme is WWIII and it involves a bunch of countries across Europe and Asia? Well, you don’t … publish it, for starters.
Image taken from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
