'Flatline' The heroes of this story are NOT the good guys.

My next novel, (which I initially expected to publish in 2015) started as a speculative fiction piece intended to be a short story. But, the characters and events got loose, and I was never able to corral them into the seven or ten thousand words I originally intended. They wanted a crime novel, and I became their galley slave.

Despite its cry for guns, guts, blood and violence, it is a clean and fairly flinch-free read. Flinching as you duck the bullets and brains.

The protagonist, Troy Bittles, is a retired enforcer for an infamous worldwide motorcycle club (gang). In retirement, he has turned his former exploits into fodder for a semi-successful writing career. He lives alone with an aging English Bulldog, Sam.

Life seems good, but the monotony is not all he thought it would be. Stacked against his former action-filled life, as an enforcer amongst outlaws, his current life is a definite flatline. For a while, he finds peace with the life he yearned for, yet one haunting deed he never can shake, the accidental murder of a child, continues to haunt his mind and heart. The hit was never supposed to go down that way. The boy was not expected to be in the house. On law enforcement logs, the child is still listed as missing, likely kidnapped.

While out for a routine walk with his dog, Troy is rat-packed by a group of street thugs. Initially, it seems unplanned although provoked by Troy. A much older outlaw shows up to help. Silas Parker, who in the spectrum of organized gangs, is the polar opposite of Troy's world. The only thing the two have in common is violence and murder.

Silas' help comes with a bite, though, as both men are propelled headlong into a series of calamitous events filled with hitmen, murder, drug cartels and runs from the police. Within these developments, Troy sees a dim chance at redemption for the one deed he felt had doomed him to a life of torment.

The story winds its way through California, Arizona, Mexico, Central America, and Brazil. In Recife, Brazil they are killing killers, the death squads preying on children whose only real crime is poverty. The story took a turn I could never have imagined, and redemption for the protagonists remains in sight but just out of reach.

The ending flabbergasted me and made me flinch.

Flatline is a crime novel. A wanton wild tale with a cast of strong, colorful characters that ride with impunity through violent circumstances mostly of their making.

The heroes in this novel are not the good guys.

Look for Flatline's release by mid-2016.

Advanced Searching - Who would believe you could do that?

Greetings,
I hope your writing, promoting and building of your social media platform is going well.
Keep the creative flow in your writing. Don't let the flame flicker and die. It's so hard to get going once it is snuffed out through the cacophony of life or inattention. Without your creative gift released into the world, we are all less. Without your craft, there is nothing for you to promote and no reason to build a platform from which to disseminate your work.

If all you want is activity on social media for social media's sake, you can do that. But, as an author or marketer, there is a greater purpose to it all. If you spend countless hours pushing tweets and facebook posts and responding to same, your flame may flicker and die as you lose any room for any real creative flow of your gift.

But, if you are interested in becoming proficient, effective and productive in your efforts. If you desire to build not just a large number of followers, but ones that are interested in the things you are interested in; Followers that will engage in conversation, share their lives and work and in turn you share theirs, synergy will happen and an organic growth of engaged followers and friends.

To accomplish this though, you will need help. By help, I don't mean turning your account over to a BOT that will retweet your followers posts while you sleep, leaving you with nearly no original content. Now, you will have lots of time, but no engagement, only a big fat worthless account. And, the help that I absolutely refuse is buying followers. The proliferation of offers to sell thousands of followers for a few dollars tells me people are buying... It would be like paying people to hang out with you, and then bragging about how many friends you have. Would they care? Would they share? What is that relationship really worth.

Okay, back to the help. We need sincere, informed help to accomplish real growth and engaged relationships. My help is Hootsuite, a Social Media Management System. To make it very clear, I am not a Hootsuite employee. I am an unpaid volunteer Brand ambassador. I feel so strongly about Hootsuite being the most comprehensive and best performing system that I find it a pleasure to promote the brand.

A system could be the greatest in the world, but useless if you are not trained in its features. In comes Hootsuite University. Thanks to Hootsuite they offer a comprehensive social media education that not only trains you in the Hootsuite Dashboard, but best practices and social media strategies.
Through Hootsuite University, I became a Certified Professional. Give it a try, in the first thirty days free trial you can become an expert and up the level of your game. After the trial period, the cost is $21.00 per month. Invaluable.

Besides teaching you all the features of the Hootsuite Dashboard, which is powerful and extensive to say the least. Hootsuite University offers courseware and video teachings to up your game and your career.

The one video and course segment I most valued was 'Advanced Listening.' I learned how to create streams that filter out what people are talking about, when and where they are talking about it. If I want to know all the people talking about coffee within, say, five miles of my home, I can have a search stream for that. Of course, that is only an example. I can then engage these people in conversations about my product, book or campaign.

The single most valuable feature of the Hootsuite platform is bulk scheduling. I can send up to 350 posts at one time to each account I have.

Also, powerful apps within Hootsuite bring me top notch content I can share through my accounts.

It is difficult to hold back and not keep going, but both our dinners are growing cold.
Please check my other posts that cover some of these things in more depth.

Have you seen Owly? Hoot! Hoot!

Hootsuite Certified Professional

The Three Stages of Building Social Community

These and many others are things I learned from Hootsuite University

Browse my other posts and you'll find still others with great tips on using social media.

Peace,
Mike



If you'd like to leave a comment and find the form tedious you can comment on my twitter feed @mikeyznsacto or Facebook M. Matheson

The 3 Stages of Building a Social Media Community

Hootsuite continues to be not only an invaluable tool for managing social media, they provide education on so many different levels. From the basic how to use the program to more in-depth articles on engaging customers, building a brand and how build a terrific following.

I just finished reading and watching a presentation, 'The 3 Stages of Building a Social Media Community' by Evan LePage a Hootsuite Author.

Stage 1: Building a Foundation for Social Media Community A foundation is critical to any enterprise whether you are building a life, a house or an online presence. This could be easy to miss for someone building a social media presence. The temptation could be to just put posts and pictures and leave it to marinate.

But, Evan pointed out that, 'The foundation of social media community is built on two-way communication."

One-way communication is no communication at all. 
All interactions such as follows and retweets on Twitter or comments in Facebook need to be acted on swift and positively. That is a key to building any relationship and is the backbone of a strong community.


Stage 2: A Growing Social Media Community is what everyone wants, but less of those are willing to do the work, often signing the elbow grease away to strange computers for $29.95 a month. That may gain you a truckload of uninvolved followers, but what we want is engagement.

The reality is, not all followers are created equal. The reason you shouldn’t simply go buy 100 followers is because they likely won’t be engaged or get involved in your community, and they might not even be real. Earning 10 engaged followers yourself is a far more valuable use of your time.

You build an online community the same way you build a flesh and blood community, one heart, one handshake and one good deed at a time. Not only acknowledge what people do for you, but do them similar good deeds.

But it's not enough just to grow a community, you must maintain them and keep them engaged.



Stage 3: Leveraging Your Social Media Community
Ultimately we're all in business to make a profit, and we must leverage (not a bad word) the community to achieve our goals, but Evan reminds us,

...never ignore the principles on which you built this community. You don’t want to throw everything you’ve built out the window for a quick sale.

Collect feedback: You want people's honest opinions This can only help us grow. Whether it's my wife's honest opinion about my haircut and shirt choice or a customer's distaste for our slogan. We need to know whether we look like a doofus or not.

Crowdsourced Content: Answers to polls, photo contests and other user-generated content is one of the greatest benefits to your social media community.

Amplify your content: Let your crowd tell the good news. Ask them for help and tell them what you need them to do. This is what a true community does, a good one anyway.

If you'd like to leave a comment and find the form tedious you can comment on my twitter feed @mikeyznsacto or Facebook M. Matheson

Have you seen Owly? Hoot! Hoot!

When I was just starting out to build a platform for marketing my books and stories, I worked the social media angle mostly from my iPhone. My PC at the time was a boat anchor running Vista. I've since turned to MAC for deliverance. Where has Mac been all my life? It was like finding the fountain of youth.

My wife grew ever more exasperated as I ran into her office each day; holding my iPhone aloft and dancing with the exciting news that ten people had followed me on Twitter that day. Up until I started working at it in July of last year, my follower count was near rock steady at a static 200 -- give or take 1-3.
Since then, my excitement has grown less naive. I have over 5400 followers and the average day sees 30-40 new ones with spikes close to a hundred on occasion. Twitter is my main marketing platform.

I also use Facebook and Google+, yet I haven't paid as much attention to those as Twitter since the little blue bird is where my best interaction, growth and success have been.

As my account grew via iPhone, I soon realized that a good SMMS (Social Media Management System) would be necessary to monitor, grow and maintain the growing interactions. Without Hootsuite as my choice, this could not have been accomplished short of going insane. I'm now a rabid fan and brand ambassador for this top-rated platform.
Just so you understand clearly, I am a volunteer and am not paid for any of my endorsements or promotional activities. Hootsuite has been such a game-changer in my efforts to build a marketing platform on social media. So much so that I want to wash the CEO's car or at least mow his lawn.
I didn't just fall into... with the first pretty bird to come along either. I did my homework. I tried the others and evaluated them for ease and performance. Hootsuite won hands down. There were super simple programs that sacrificed too much performance. That would not work for me. I test drove Owly(HootSuite's monicker). Within the month, I upgraded to the Pro Version and never looked back.

If you are on Twitter at all, you have no doubt been bombarded with ads for adding followers, 10,000 guaranteed in one day for $29.95. Sounds like an old commercial from the 70's for painting cars. I tried it and the paint peeled within the year. That same thing will happen to your new bytes of friends. Do you really want to pay for your friends? Can we be so desperate for recognition that we pay some computer savvy person money to tweak the system so it looks like 10,000 people were interested in what we had to say? What kind of gravitas will be gained by that number under our profile pic? The proliferation of such offers suggests a lot of people drink that Kool-Aid.

Well?

If 10,000 REAL people, in one fell swoop and all in one day, were interested in me and my books, the media would be parked in front of my house clamoring for an interview like flies on a sugar stain. Quite a temptation for a writer...

And, there are others offering to automatically manage my content for me. Just think of the free time that would suddenly be available to me. Succumb to that one and you'd end up with hearts and flower romance novels in horror story posts or vice-versa (I've seen it). How about a little porn stirred in with your Christian brand? That would do wonders for your image.
The profiles using automated content providers are easy to spot; they have no original content. All their posts are Retweets and rarely any original content from the account holder. Occasionally a post says someone else is doing the heavy lifting -- just for legalities sake.

Me, I like to get to know people whether online or in person. I like to shake their hand even if it is across the data stream. I like to recognize and celebrate them for their achievements and help them achieve their goals. Yes, Mom all that happens on a well run Twitter profile. Read my post on the simpler basics of Twitter I learned from watching others and by applying Common Courtesies and a Handshake to Social Media.

Meanwhile back at the ranch --
I really need to give credit where credit is due. Without HootSuite's SMMS (Social Media Management System) I could not have accomplished what I have so far. Hootsuite allows you, through an online dashboard, to manage multiple Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn or Word Press accounts, and you can manage multiple accounts within each one of those. I'm out of breath just thinking about it.
In addition, there is a plethora of third-party apps  to work with available through the dashboard: Instagram, YouTube, and even Gmail. Being web based you can do all this from anywhere in the world on any computer. There is a free version of HootSuite' or a Pro version for $9.95 a month which has proved its worth ten and a hundred fold, perhaps more, each and every month.

Within my dashboard, I manage 9 different Social Media accounts, some of those I curate for companies who were impressed with my proficiency, knowledge and the results I got back from my own accounts. I can also manage each of those on a limited basis from my iPhone and iPad. Using a laptop or desktop computer, of course, enables you to extract all of the features and best benefits.

Since my mainstream is Twitter, I'll tell you my experience from that standpoint. The single most beneficial thing is the bulk scheduler from which I can upload up to 350 messages at one time to each profile. For me, that's about two week's worth of content. This takes a little head scratching and finger grease, but if you have a bare minimum of experience with Excel you can do it. I learned through a reccomendation from HootSuite's help pages that the best program to use is Google Sheets their online answer to Excel. Sheets is not as powerful as Excel, but having it web based alongside the HootSuite Dashboard is more convenient than bouncing from software locked to one computer in which you have to save filenames and perform other juggling acts. Sheets also makes cleaner CSV files for uploading.

HootSuite even gives you templates ready for you to enter your info. The date and time go in the leftmost cell, the contents of your post in the next and technically a link goes in the third column. The digits you see in the fifth column is my own invention: I have a formula there that counts the characters in the content column. Since Twitter is limited to 140 characters, it removes a lot of guesswork. Then save a CSV file of the sheet and upload through Dashboard/publisher/bulk message upload. If there are any errors the program will tell you what and where they are located. A note on the third column link: I shorten links beforehand in Hootsuite's composition box and insert in the second cell. It works better for me and keeping count of characters.

This is my dashboard, like command central. From here I monitor Retweets, New Followers, Mentions and even see what my latest tweets were since I scheduled them up to 2 weeks ago and can't remember what they were without looking. Now I can respond rapidly and appropriately to those interacting with my account. By the way, that is only one tab visible. If you scan across the top you'll see 9 more tabs and the last one holds multiple streams also.

One more beautiful thing is search streams. I can check on the competition or other sites putting up great content that I can use. I can even find everyone within a specified radius of anywhere talking about coffee or church or whatever you might need -- to find people locally that are interested in what you like.

I do have a few more tricks up my sleeve.

Always on the hunt for a faster and better way, Google Sheets have been a godsend. Look at the tabs on the bottom. I used to keep different sheets for every upload, now I keep the same one, change the dates and time and change the informative tweets. Promotional tweets I keep in the same time slot, tweaking. adding and subtracting them as needed. Retweets, quotes, and funny dog pics are exchanged for new ones and these I keep in other tabs. There are tabs that hold all my blog tweets and tabs that hold all my books and another one for the stories I giveaway and on and on it goes.

Last but not least and probably the best feature of HootSuite is its people. Customer service is near instantaneous, only a Tweet away through @HootSuite_Help. If they don't have an instant solution they sic a team of people on it till it is done.

Recently, I have  become a HootSuite Ambassador, one small part of 1,000 others who volunteer to support the brand because they believe so strongly in it. 

HootSuite has improved my life.

If you'd like to leave a comment and find the form tedious you can also comment on my twitter feed @mikeyznsacto or Facebook M. Matheson

The Taxman is Here

A name that releases ubiquitous fear within adults of tax paying age and income is THE TAXMAN. This also is the name of my new short story.

Kenneth Selznick is an auditor with the IRS, he is 41 years of age and still lives at home with MOTHER, Malvina the Malevolent. This arrangement has produced an insanity within Kenneth that preys upon the happy world around him. His twisted brand of joy comes from auditing returns and watching good honest people bleed slowly to death. The more honest and happy, the more he enjoys the kill. The tables in this short tale continuously turn as Kenneth's fortunes twist and turn.

That's all you'll get about the tale without reading the story except for a little background.

The original idea for this story came from a real audit of my wife and I. If you've had the misfortune to be audited, you know the grief that it can bring no matter how level and straight your records have been. There is no shortage of myth, true or false, and lore surrounding the Internal Revenue Service's ravaging of the peace of common citizens.

When my wife and I were audited several years back, we knew we had done our due diligence, yet the fear remained. Our biggest worry was how much this was going to cost us. Well, weren't we surprised to learn we would be getting money back, a lot of money, and it was the IRS that had made the error. I'm sure that does not happen often.

I hope you enjoy my story which couldn't have been made possible without the beta reading, advice, edits and big suggestions to the storyline by Melinda Matthews.

Please check out her Amazon Author page and follow her Twitter page.

Why Crave Peace?

We all crave peace, don't we?
Many if not most seek solitude to create their works whether it is stories or visual art. But for me to craft a great story I need to be drenched in the chaos of life. 

My good friend, one who understands the need for me to write, he's a photo and paint artist, tries continually to hook me up with the perfect peaceful place to write. 

I have failed to make him understand my need to be surrounded by cacophonous life. For instance, I enjoy the atmosphere at Starbucks more than my easy chair in the quiet of my home. Although, Starbucks is not my first choice if I want good coffee, Duh! But it does fill the need I have for a variety of noise, nuisances and availability. The Starbucks Store I most often haunt, sitting hunched in the corner tapping my keys, has the extra bonus of being next door to a residential motel — meaning it comes with a great assortment of hookers, pimps and thieves. Add in a dash of homeless folks that occasionally bathe in the restroom and you have quite an interesting stew.

I am here writing this blog. McKinley Park Sacramento with my son asleep in my lap.

Starbucks ubiquitous presence makes any of their nine million locations an easy decision. 

Yet, I must give a shout-out to the best coffee in the world and the coolest environment, Old Soul Coffee Co. Sacramento, CA. 

Read Coffee magazine and you'll find that Sacramento has the best coffee in the nation. 

Back to why I'm writing this piece. If I was cloistered away in a severe little cell high in some rugged mountains or stranded on a desert island with my laptop and a very long extension cord, I'd get very little done. And, what I would manage to pen would be very aesthetic, self-focused and likely psychotic. 

As I write this, I'm on a park bench with my little boy asleep in my lap, and rather than stick my thumb in my navel and  take in the scene, I'm writing to you. 

Peace,

M

Boredom- How In The World Does It Exist

Back when… (Oh, this is going to make me feel old) two of our grandkids were not yet teenagers. They were swimming at our house. The boy who will soon to be going into the Air Force wanted to play video games inside, but I denied him that pleasure. He exclaimed, “But I’ll be bored!”

People who know me have learned by experience to never tell me they are BORED.

I cannot bring myself to believe that there is any reason for any human to be bored except one – they want to. I’m okay with that. But don’t complain about a problem that doesn’t exist. It’s like the activist atheist that complains about people believing in something that, to them, doesn’t exist. Why is it a problem?

If you are at any time bored with this life and can’t find anything to do, pick up a book, libraries are still free. Books can take you to fantastic foreign lands or teach you a craft and hobby. Even if you are all thumbs, you can get the vicarious thrill of doing-it-yourself just by reading a book about doing it. Stephen King, the master of good storytelling said: Books are a uniquely portable magic.

WARNING-Dogmatic opinions ahead.

A video game or a TV show will not take away your boredom; they will only increase your futility and boredom with life by filling up the empty white space for the time being. Like the empty calories of cotton candy, they taste really good but never satisfy or fill you up.

If you don’t want to read, write. Get out a pen or your laptop. Grip the pen lightly in hand over a tablet of paper and see what comes out. Along with reading, it’s also a strange magic. Poise your fingers over a keyboard while staring at the blank white rectangle in your word-processing software and voilà magic again. It’s no matter that others like it or not. Public approval is only a bonus to the joy I receive as I pen down my thoughts.

“What was that you said? ‘I can’t write!’”

I beg to differ, but you write every day if only in your head.

Start with the wishes you wished would come true –

A new job, adventure, lover or friend.

Create them on paper, explore their new worlds.

Bring them to life with ink, paper and pen

Or hide them away in miniscule bytes

Unseen data forever so full of life.

You write lists, emails and Facebook posts. You are quite clever aren’t you? Oh, let’s not forget the omnipresent text message, which only scraggly haired hermits with mystically yellow and curled fingernails forgo.

The answer I told my grandson to his statement/complaint about boredom:

“What’s wrong with that?” That ten-year-old face screwed up in a ball, started to speak, and then realized he’d been handed a hot potato of sorts.

From there on out he had a blast in the pool tormenting his younger sister and vice-versa.

Boredom perhaps is something to do in itself. Rich people are bored, poor people are bored, yet each have a mind and are endowed with the ability to create. Albert Einstein pointed out that every new idea or ingenious creation started with only one person who was born with the similar attributes as you and I.

Hopefully, I took away any excuse you had to be bored. I think I will go post a link to this blog on my grandson’s Facebook Page.

If you'd like to leave a comment and find the form tedious you can comment on my twitter feed @mikeyznsacto or Facebook M. Matheson