I got a marketing email from Amazon a couple days ago that said that some of my books were eligible to be turned into an audiobook using AI voice. I turned three of them into audiobooks almost immediately. One of the only times a marketing email was actually effective on me.
https://www.audible.com/search?searchAuthor=Kalin+Ringkvist
The other three were not eligible because they did not have table of contents, so right now it’s just my short story collections that have audio versions. I went through The Pioneers and gave it a Table of Contents and chapter names but it still kept saying it wasn’t eligible for audiobook generation due to no TOC. I kept trying, fiddling with it, making sure I had the headers set up just like I did in my other books, and it just didn’t work. Contacted customer service and wow, they answered the chat in less than a minute and said “thanks for bringing this to our attention” and their technical people will get back to me–so I’m guessing it’s some sort of bug on their end–I mean it has to be in some sense because I can clearly see my book has a TOC cuz I can test it in the previewer and it’s set up exactly the same as in my other books.
Anyway, I think this is gonna be a boring entry. I don’t feel this going anywhere.
Going back to my old books like that has been bringing up a lot of memories. I started listening to The Water Glass and it brought up so many old emotions. I forgot just how much of my personality comes through in those old stories and how much the characters meant to me.
When I was a teenager, my dream was to be a famous author, to be good enough to be able to go to book signings and make a solid living off it, enough so that people would write me letters and ask when my next book comes out. Of course, that did not happen. I’m not sure how many readers I’ve gotten. Only a handful of reviews for my books on Amazon, but I do occasionally get a couple dollars here and there from Amazon, so folks are at least flipping through the pages on kindle.
I wonder if others in my situation would feel like a failure since I’m not a genuinely “published author”–but even though my goal did not come true, these stories were still well worth the time, even if it’s just for me. They’re such an incredible part of my life.
I’m thinking I should go back and find This Desert Life and post it here. I actually removed it from the interwebs years ago because I was just embarrassed by it, like I thought it was horrible–but maybe it wasn’t as cringe and awful as I think it is. I haven’t read it in 20 years or so. When I first put it out on my original website, Get to Know a Marijuana Dealer, I had a number of people emailing me telling me it was the most incredible thing they’d ever read, that it was super insightful, life-changing–but then other people read it and were like “what the fuck was that?”
It’s weird, I had sort of forgotten about my identity as a story writer until this week, now it feels like my whole identity has shifted, but this time it’s shifted like back to someone I used to be.
For those of you who have never truly tried writing a story from your heart, it can be a deeply spiritual experience. You’re creating people or even a whole other world.
Maybe I’m realizing that story writing was my form of prayer, my way of getting in touch with God, of seeing alternate realities, of understanding the hand of God by pretending to be him in my own little worlds.
But I haven’t been writing hardly any fiction the last five or six years. Not since I finished the rewrite of Daughter, previously called Rediscovering Communication in 2018 have I really–no no, that’s not true, I wrote a fetish romance novella that I don’t actually put on Amazon. I don’t know exactly why. Part of me wants to put it out there under a pseudonym, not that I’m worried about people finding out because it would not be difficult for anyone to find my kink social media profile and know all about my weird sex life, but I don’t want to advertize it here or on my Amazon author page just because that’s not what my purpose here is. Like kink, fetish stuff, polyamory and the whole LGBTQ thing is something I do, something I really enjoy and it’s a part of me for sure, but it’s not the important parts. That stuff is all a side-effect of my belief in freedom, the way I deal with trauma, my desire to spread love as far as possible and my deep faith in peace.
I guess what I’m saying is that if you’re not already interested in kink, then I don’t want to try to sell you my kink writings. That’s not where my value as a writer actually lies.
But maybe I should put it out there on Amazon anyway, just put a big warning in the blurb, “Sexually explicit and weird. Kalin does not want you to read this unless you are legit interested in the subject matter. I don’t want this piece to define me.”
Maybe I should put out This Desert Life too.
Maybe I should edit out the super-cringe stuff–in a way that feels dishonest, but maybe I should just put a “kalin’s ramblings” at the beginning where I say, “sorry, this is edited from it’s original because” — hmm… I wonder why I’m feeling this way about this book. My second novel was also really bad and I went back and almost completely rewrote it, or like 60% of it at least, and that is now Daughter, which is my proudest literary creation. I don’t feel dishonest about editing that–why would going back and re-visiting This Desert Life be so dishonest–what if it’s not as bad as I thought it was? Or what if the badness made it good, kind of like The Room?
–maybe it has to do with the fact that one friend of mine said she absolutely loved it and told me that it was perfect the way it was and that I shouldn’t change a word.
There were so many people who told me it was absolutely brilliant, so why am I so convinced it’s total crap? — I mean, some people told me it was really bad
Why am I so fucking scared of my first novel?
Maybe it was because I was in a pretty dark place when I wrote it? I had just witnessed a police officer murder someone, beating him to death right in front of me, and the fear of retaliation was overwhelming me so I didn’t talk about it and instead, created Lisa the slave on this distant desert world and for six months buried myself in her life to escape what I had witnessed. To hide from my responsibility of actually speaking out about it.
This is good. Glad I sat down and started writing about this.
Weird how my whole view on certain things can start to really change just by writing a few paragraphs about my feelings.
Gosh, what if I brought back my first novel?
At the very least I need to find a way to listen to it via AI voice or maybe even sit down and read it the old fashioned way like I did when I was a teenager and see what I think of it, see if it’s really as bad as I remember it and see if maybe I can clean it up and salvage it or something.
Or maybe this is just another delay tactic.
Maybe I’m still hiding.
Instead, maybe I need to write an entry where I outline the job I want to hire someone for to start promoting my stuff for me.
I feel so darn fearless, at least when I compare myself to how others behave, I feel like I’m absolutely fearless (except when it comes to cars and cops of course, maybe heights, and let’s not forget dentists–but other than those things I’m fearless) but no that’s not true, I’m definitely not fearless, even with being open about my emotions. I’m definitely exhibiting a lot of fear/avoidance tactics. I need to pull the trigger and find someone to start promoting my work.