StarFleet Carl: Blog

Chapter 24 is up and posted, again as a thank you for all three books of A True History having hit one million downloads.

Wow! I started writing A True History back in 2016, but never got a full chapter done. I knew what I wanted it to do, but I couldn't figure out how to get it there. Fast forward to winter of 2019, when I had two epic length novels under my belt and I decided to just bull through things.

As of today, on SOL, Book One is over 366,000 downloads, Book Two is almost 354,000 downloads, and the first 23 chapters of Book Three are nearly 280,000 downloads. That hits the magic ONE MILLION DOWNLOADS mark.

Chapter 24 is now loaded up for tomorrow morning, ya mooch! (That's aimed at one specific person - he knows who he is!) For the rest of you, thank you for reading. I'm plugging away on Book 4, only on Chapter 4 of it, but I finally got through a bit of a logjam. Those four days I spent in the hospital halfway fried me, so it's taken me until this long to get things unstuck. I'm still planning on starting to post Book 4 on here around Thanksgiving.

Oh, and for all those people who think Cal is a shit now, or could be doing things a little differently, this little excerpt is from my ORIGINAL draft:

I'm pretty much the absolute ruler of Earth at this point. The whole planet. And protector of the whole solar system, too. But that's an advantage to being me.

Didn't exactly plan it that way from the beginning. Shit happens.

Relatively speaking, I'm rather benevolent, too. At least in my own opinion. And that's the only opinion that matters to me, really. I have several people I care about, of course. I'm not completely antisocial or a psychopath.

As for why I'm actually writing this whole autobiography, it's pretty simple. I'm probably not going to live forever. And I want to make sure that my side of things is out there. I realize that this makes me sound like a bit of a dick, but … again, absolute ruler of the planet Earth, so it sort of goes with the territory.

Chapter 23 is uploaded for this Saturday. There is a fair amount of discussion in this chapter. One of the things that comic books seem to never address is that the super-hero isn't operating in a vacuum. For Cal, while the CIA literally doesn't exist any longer, and the NSA has been discredited, there's still half a dozen other intelligence services in the US, plus the KGB, Mossad, MI-6, and Santa Alleanza (or whatever name the 'non-existent' Vatican intelligence service uses), in addition to others.

The Vatican denying having an intelligence service is sort of like Israel saying they don't have nuclear weapons, they don't know what you're talking about, and they didn't work with South Africa and detonate one. Yeah, would you like to buy this bridge ...

Just as a reminder, if you've already purchased Book One on Bookapy, I uploaded newer, tweaked versions of the files, that took care of the plethora of goofs, missed words, etc. Book One on here has also been completely replaced with the new chapters as well.

I mentioned previously that I was uploaded new, tweaked copies of A True History, Book One. Those are complete other than correcting Caltech a couple more times on SOL.

The versions on Bookapy are all newly uploaded, created with Sigil and converted using Calibre. I DID fix the Caltech errors in those, because it was easy. The EPUB and MOBI files appear to have zero errors in them. The PDF file has an HTML table of contents embedded in it, because Calibre put it there. It doesn't work, just ignore it, the Table of Contents on the left side of the screen DOES work.

Note - that's MY screen. I'm running Windows 64, and just using a PDF viewer. Your results may vary. Based upon my info, there have been 238 of you who have purchased a copy of Book One. You should now be able to download this tweaked version without any issues. Tweaks meaning fixing missed words, misplaced commas, and other assorted grammar or spelling goofs. That doesn't mean there still might not be some - just ... I've fixed what we've found.

Thank you, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, for my personal condition update from this past week. Chapter 22 is uploaded for Saturday. EMOTION WARNING FOR CHAPTER 22 - not as bad as when the MFA went to the Wall (which still affects me, and I wrote the damn chapter), but still pretty intense.

Without getting too much into the nitty gritty, I had a bad urinary tract infection. Of course, for guys, there is no such thing as a GOOD UTI - or even a mild one. We get one, it's automatically considered bad, because we don't get them that often.

Four days in the hospital, lots of drama the first day due to fever induced tremors, spasms, and convulsions and concern those had caused a mild heart attack, but not much after that, and net result is, lots of antibiotics and monitoring, and I'm released. Six more days of Keflex at home. One good thing about being a REALTOR(tm). No set schedule of hours, so I can be sick at home. Therefore, I shall veg for the rest of the day!