25-28 May 2018In October 2017, A friend of a friend on Facebook caught wind of Pete's revamped story, entitled Mind the Portal, and very kindly invited me to be a panelist and presenter at Baycon - a science fiction and fantasy convention in the Bay area then in its 30somethingth year. I was bowled over, humbled, grateful, and determined to make a big splash for all things Omni. I dove into the project with gusto, completing more collateral materials and making more goodies than imaginable for the four-day Memorial weekend extravaganza.
The whole affair ended up being a mammoth bust for me. Zero book sales. I mean zero. Meanwhile, other writers with far less experience and far simpler booth setups sold out of their stock, and they brought plenty! To say I was disheartened would be a mega understatement. I spent thousands on the event and was prepared to the last annoying detail.
I came home feeling more defeated than I could say, especially after so many seeming failures over the last few years. I couldn't understand it. I used to be "successful" when I took on a new project. But in recent years, everything I put my hand to tanked! I did some soul searching, and one idea after another came as to how to go about the Omni project differently. Had Pete's story taken off during that convention, I would not have been able to do what I am now doing.
In short, I've been writing all 7 books (the most recent, book #5, is 192K in length) with the idea of getting the first draft of the entire series done before publishing (in this case, re-publishing) any of it so I can insert foreshadowing into the earlier parts of the story. That's something I wouldn't be able to do if I wrote and published each of the seven books one at a time.
Additionally, a million new ideas have surfaced that relate to how to repurpose the unfulfilled (yet somehow all affiliated) projects written about in previous posts on this blog. I realized none of them were truly a bust. They were all just waiting for the right time and conditions. I am going the route of Thomas Edison who was famously quoted as saying, "I haven't failed -- I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work" and “Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”
That said, I'm not giving up. In fact, I'm just getting started. The Omni machine is now fully in gear and on track. If you're brave enough to see all it will entail, click here to go to the page that shows the Omni product rollouts.
