Black, White, and RED ALL Over -- Now Available on Amazon Kindle!

See what you did, @dreemsteem and @mariannewest and @freewritehouse? See? SEE?

From the Steem blockchain to Amazon – Black, White, and RED All Over, which I ran here for extended content as thanks to you great folks at the Freewrite House, now available as a whole live Kindle book on Amazon – my FOURTH book! It is available on Amazon HERE!

See, this is how this all happened: I came to Steem in March 2019 and was minding my own business making pennies steadily and getting bouts Steemit Induced Depression only relieved by the wonderful stuff for newbies provided by @pifc, @team-ccc, and support for my music posts from @classical-music.

Then, I discovered @mariannewest and #freewrite, and got a daily prompt about a window. That ended up putting me on @felt.buzz, @mariita52, and @ocd's map – FIRST Curie vote, got whitelisted by @ocd, made first $10-plus upvote post. That convinced me to pay attention to freewriting and the Freewrite House in general.

I have been a prolific writer for YEARS – next year, it will be 30 in total, out of 39. So, even though it was music that brought me to Steemit, I ended up reaching for my other strength, and began doing more writing to be read for immediate feedback than I have since I was in professional journalism.

And that's the other thing. What you are SUPPOSED to do before you put a book out is have it read and reviewed and talked about with beta readers – and of course, the Freewrite House has a Beta Readers Group. I found all that out later – but the freewrite community responded with a lot of positive feedback and also asked questions to help me know where my writing could be clearer.

Then came the “nunchucks” prompt … that one nearly stumped me, but then I reached back 20 years, pulled out Ironwood Hamilton from my teenage mystery writing days, put him in a small town in a county in Virginia that I created for some Civil-War era fiction that I hope to publish this year, left Captain Hamilton in modernity, and had him take down a whole bunch of criminals after he remembered the perfect control weapon … you should go back and read how he learned in a boyhood school situation how a nun chucks rotten eggs as a control weapon.

(But that's the thing. Going back and reading old posts is kind of hard … Steem has so much content, and I have been VERY prolific. Problem about to be solved; bear with me …)

Captain Hamilton took on 600 bottles of beer on the wall and a black widow and whatever I couldn't quite figure out how to handle as a prompt … and then things got more serious, largely because of the real-world situations we are all living through around race in this country. So, there he was, a small-town police officer in Virginia – where was this character going to stand?

If you know me, you know: no character I put time into as a good guy gets to be a racist.

That opened the door to more expanded story lines … so when a happy accident led to the freewriting community having me as a prompt and me adopted by Freewrite House the following week, I rolled out extended content as a thank you, and thus wrote out and serially published Black, White, and RED All Over on the Steem blockchain in two weeks in July!

The feedback and the support and questions and suggestions were priceless, folks – quite naturally (because you all really know how to support writers), you provided me what I needed to make that story everything it could be.

Afterward, the thing was long enough to actually be a whole book – so, after having a few more people around me read it, I took it live on Amazon on October 11!

None of this could have happened without Steem and @mariannewest and all of you around @freewritehouse and @ocd. I told you it was all y'all's fault – THANK YOU!

For EVERYBODY, this is your invitation to get caught up or get started without having to search backwards and backwards to find a 14-part set of posts to find out what the excitement is all about – at $2.99, the price is right, and I would really appreciate the USD support, because it helps sustain me for the time I set aside to write! Check it out HERE, and I appreciate your purchase!

A big thank you here to @owasco, @wakeupkitty, @fitinfun, @mgaft1, @deemarshall, and @whatisnew, who regularly interact with the big bridging story between Black, White, and RED All Over and the new extended content … I finally saw a prompt today that will lead right on into The Posture of Innocence, in which Captain Hamilton and his cousin Captain Lee will switch leading roles, and you will get to find out what happens to some of the people you have been meeting every day as part of the daily freewrite! I know y'all have questions … next week, hopefully Monday, October 21, many answers will be embedded along with a cold case that leads to quite a hot time for Captain Lee, Mrs. Thornton, Commissioner Scott, and a whole bunch of other characters you have yet to meet!

Again, thank you to @mariannewest, @freewritehouse, and the entire freewriting community – there are so many names I could list, but thank you to ALL of YOU!