Lisbon Portugal - Travel Photography, Art and Book Talk

Lisbon Portugal is enjoying a moment as the talk of the town and it’s long overdue. While we’re not so thrilled about one of favorite coastal idylls becoming a hotpot for remote workers and tourists, we are ready to share some of its secrets.

People often think of Lisbon as a port city in Portugal and an ocean beach destination, though the city itself is not actually on the ocean at all or even a direct beach destination. For starters, the coastal areas of Lisbon are on the banks of a river, the Tagus River. The Torre de Belem, the famous tower near the city limits that you see in photographs is ten kilometers from where the mouth of the Tagus River meets the Atlantic Ocean.

An enormous natural bay formed by the river around its delta contains a mix of salt and fresh water, and is home to expansive wetlands where thousands of bird species migrate through every year, making it one of the richest and most biodiverse places on the planet. This alone should make Lisbon a nature tourism destination, but the city is better known for nightlife, gastronomy (food) and beaches. The nightlife is good and often even great, as are the wealth of restaurants that range from inexpensive dives to fine dining. 

Portuguese cuisine like the language itself is unique. Heavily influenced by its proximity to the ocean, Portuguese food features a lot of fish and seafood, but also beef and pork. The most famous dish is bacalhau; a salted, seasoned cod, that is best in a stew or casserole. A close second may be the sweet, Portuguese egg tart. Some other great dishes...

As we said earlier, Lisbon itself isn’t really a beach or swimming destination at all. Those famous beaches people talk about in the same breath as Lisbon? They’re known as the Beaches of Almada and there are twenty eight of them. Yes, 28, from Praia Trafaria to Praia da Adiça. All fairly easy to access.

To get to the Almada beaches, you’ll have to get out of the city and across the stunningly beautiful 2KM suspension bridge known as Ponte 25 de Abril, where you’ll then find the closest beach is about a half hour’s drive away and some of the others are up to an hour’s drive away. The best of them include Praia da Cova, Praia de São João, Praia do Tarquínio-Paraíso, Praia Nova, Praia da Saúde, Praia da Cornélia, Praia da Mata, Praia da Riviera, Praia do Castelo, and Praia da Morena.

Pick one or several to visit. Your favorites will depend on whether you like to be with others or more isolated by yourself.

Another reason we love Lisbon because it is literally the beating heart of Portugal. Within an hour of the city, you have nature reserves, preserves, and national parks. All spectacular and stunning in their own way. Costa de Caparica is a nature preserve of protected coastal plains. Estuário do Tejo is a wetland estuary. Pena, Monserrate and Sintra are national parks within a forested mountain range, featuring mountain-side palaces and cliff-top castles.

One of these cliff-top castles is Castle of the Moors, shown below in a fine art photograph by William. Our photoshoot of the Castle of the Moors was incredibly challenging due to the mountainous terrain.

Most photos of Castle of the Moors are on the approach or close up, but William wanted to photograph the castle in a way that was different. As a result, we didn’t get the shots we wanted on our first visit to the castle. Instead, it was an exploration of approaches, light and terrain.

Getting around the mountainous terrain proved to be the biggest impediment. The narrow roads wind through the nearby village and up the steep mountain side. If you lose your way or miss a turn, you have to go around and around to get back to where you lost your way. On the mountain side, car parking ranges from difficult to near impossible. Hop on the shuttle or wander too far and you can easily lose where you parked, then hike the steep terrain for hours looking for your car.

After seven days of trekking up and down and all around, we came away with six photos of Castle of the Moors that William knew were keepers. Six of hundreds that were discarded. Still, those days weren’t all about a castle, they were also about a palace that looked like it was pulled straight from a fairytale. The Palace of Pena at Sintra.

If Castle of the Moors was William’s white whale that week, the Palace of Pena at Sintra was a dream through fog. The Palace is notoriously crowded from the time the park it lies within opens to the time the park closes. The Palace also has been photographed and photographed.

William took shots from many different angles and approaches. In different light. Early morning, full sun, late in the day. Day after day, he wasn’t happy with any of them. None of them were what he was looking for. Then on the fifth day as it rained on and off, William snapped two photographs of the palace emerging into the light from behind the shadows of clouds and knew they were the ones he’d been waiting for. Michelangelo of sunsets indeed. William works with light and shadow like few others.

One other photograph from the series of photoshoots made the cut. It was a photograph that also showcased shadow and light, taken from within the palace itself, on one of the many self-guided walking tours of the interior we took. Some photographs speak to you. Some loudly. Others in unassuming tenors, with simple splendor.

For fellow writers out there, it is true that one can write from anywhere, but it took a lot of special considerations to ship the crates of servers that William needed for technical how-to writing for Microsoft from one place to the next. But he never missed a deadline, and never told where he was writing from :)

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Hui Cha Stanek and William Stanek

About Hui Cha Stanek & William Robert Stanek

Erstwhile Photographer and Long-time Publisher Hui Cha Stanek has always been the woman behind the scenes. She has managed the day-to-day operations of Stanek Media for the past three decades. Her work has been featured in a number of gallery shows and recently in a career retrospective with her husband. She prefers candid street photography and photography of people (though not traditional portrait work). Some of her most famous works, including Tip Toe I See You and Salt Water Taffy, shown in Hui Cha William's career retrospective in Vienna can be found at https://www.pictorem.com/gallery/360.Studios?cat=10605&iframe=1.

Hui Cha's most recent project is writing the text for William R. Stanek: The Black & White Collection #1 Rare Masters. @ Amazon - BN - Walmart - HPB

Seattle-based Photographer and Artist, William Robert Stanek, is a combat veteran who supports other veterans, is also a vocal champion of books and libraries. Not only an artist, he wrote nonfiction for over three decades as William Stanek and fiction as Robert Stanek. Find his fine art photography and prints from his original oil paintings in his online studios:

360 Studios - https://www.pictorem.com/gallery/360.Studios

1North Studios - https://www.pictorem.com/gallery/1north

Studio 24 - https://www.pictorem.com/gallery/24

Robert Stanek Studios - https://www.pictorem.com/gallery/robert.stanek

Connecting to his roots in his work is important to William Robert. The beautiful fine art print that follows is a view from within Mont St. Michel in Normandy France, part of his popular A Day at Mont St. Michel photo series. Special to William Robert as this is the region where his French ancestors are from--an ancestry William Robert has traced back from Quebec Canada to its origins in France.




Find William Robert's books at

Walmart https://walmart.com/c/brand/robert-stanek

BN https://barnesandnoble.com/s/%22Robert%20Stanek%22?Ntk=P_key_Contributor_List&Ns=P_Sales_Rank&Ntx=mode+matchall

Play https://play.google.com/store/search?q=robert%20stanek&c=books

iTunes https://books.apple.com/us/author/robert-stanek/id55535880

Amazon https://amazon.com/gp/product/B0841YDHSH

Spotify https://open.spotify.com/search/"robert%20stanek"/audiobooks 

eStories https://www.estories.com/author/654/Robert-Stanek

Chirp https://www.chirpbooks.com/authors/robert-stanek-audiobooks

Thanks for reading!

Finding the Armchair Traveler in All of Us

Hope you had wonderful holidays! As much as I enjoy traveling, I also enjoy reading about traveling. I think there’s a secret armchair traveler in all of us. Some know me as Katie/Kate from William Robert’s combat memoir, Air War: The Incredible True Story of the Combat Flyers, which was recently released in a 20th Anniversary edition. William Robert and I started our path together over 30 years ago, as husband and wife and as business partners. He has always been the creative, the writer and artist, but for just as long, I’ve been his arts & press publisher and the woman behind the scenes of our gallery partnerships, such as those with World Galleries. While I handled his small press work and art/photography, large multinational publishers handled his other work, including IDG, Prentice Hall, Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House, Macmillan, McGraw-Hill, Hachette, HarperCollins, Pearson Education, Cengage Learning, Microsoft, Wiley, TimeWarner, O'Reilly, HMH, and over 100 other publishers globally.

Whenever I tell people my husband is the William Stanek/Robert Stanek, writer and photographer, I’m often asked what it’s like to live with someone so creative, so driven. Well, that’s kind of a difficult question to answer. But I will say, for all those curious, that William Robert’s been my best friend in life for as long as we’ve been partners, both in a romantic and a business sense. He’s the best husband, the best father to our children.

There’s a reason those who truly know William Robert, especially other writers and artists, think of him as a gentle giant, a warrior poet and a beautiful person. He’s not only one of the most kind and thoughtful, he’s also one of the most artistic, creative and inspiring people around. He’s overcome so much in his life to get where he is today—poverty, violence, neglect, death, homelessness, combat, health issues, more. It’s a wonder he got here at all, and yet he did.

William Robert and I have lived a wonderful and eventful life, a full life, due in large part to his creative eye and dedication to purpose, to craft, to the people around him. He expresses himself in his words and art, using the pain and the tremendous obstacles he faced in his childhood and early life as a source of inspiration, rather than despair, while striving for heights he would not have reached otherwise.

I may be biased, but I think his work is incredibly special. His photographs capture something very raw, real and beautiful about life, whether his subject is a medieval cathedral, a sky-filling sunset after a storm or a mountain half seen in the distance.

With this in mind, I want to invite you to visit the world with us and dream through our new premium large-format photography book: William R. Stanek. The Black and White Collection #1: Fine Art Photography Rare Masters.

@ Barnes & Noble

@ Amazon.com

@ Bookshop.org

@ HPB

Meant for discerning collectors and special collections, this premium, oversized book works wonderfully to display on a coffee or cocktail table to inspire conversation when you are entertaining and to simply pass the time. Inside, you’ll find more than 100 fine art photographs from the Rare Master series by William, photographs from throughout his 30+-year career.

Producing a premium fine art photography book is expensive. Individual photographs featured in this book sell for hundreds of dollars in William’s studios. It was a challenge to find the right balance, to ensure not to devalue the work to which William has dedicated his life while delivering value in book form to you as the reader. For this reason, we are delivering William’s Rare Masters as a series of volumes that can be collected individually at a lower price point, and as books that combine multiple volumes into a single volume at a higher price point. We hope you agree this balanced approach works well.

Throughout this book, I discuss the story behind the work when possible to give you insider insights and to inspire conversation and, perhaps, to inspire your own adventures too.

Full page photographs, with extras. Photoshoot locations:

1. Newport Beach, California, USA

2. Lucerne, Switzerland

3. Ghent, Belgium

4. Vienna, Austria

5. Paris, France

6. Lucerne, Switzerland

7. Paris, France

8. Costa del Sol, Andalusia, Spain

9. The Bernese Highlands, Switzerland

10. Bavaria, Germany

11. Vienna, Austria

12. Oa’hu, Hawaii, USA 

13. Orléans, France

14. Kauai, Hawaii, USA

15. Florida, USA

16. Kauai, Hawaii, USA

17. Zermatt, Switzerland

18. Ghent, Belgium

19. Kauai, Hawaii, USA

20. Ghent, Belgium

21. O’ahu, Hawaii

22. O’ahu, Hawaii

23. Hallstatt, Austria

24. Kinderdijk, Netherlands

25. Orléans, France

26. Washington state, USA

27. Colorado, USA

28. Lake Hallstatt, Austria

29. Oregon, USA

30. Berchtesgaden, Bavaria, Germany

31. Kinderdijk, Netherlands

32. Bavaria, Germany

33. Colorado, USA

34. Kauai, Hawaii, USA

35. Oregon, USA

36. Adelboden, Switzerland

37. Oregon, USA

38. Bournemouth, Dorset, UK

39. Vienna, Austria

40. South Carolina, USA

41. Vienna, Austria

42. Maui, Hawaii, USA

43. Cannon Beach, Oregon, USA

44. Hawaii, USA

45. Hawaii, USA

46. Florence, Italy

47. London, Great Britain, UK

48. Bavaria, Germany

49. Hawaii, USA

50. Hawaii, USA

51. Hawaii, USA

52. Lake Tahoe, California, USA

53. Berchtesgaden, Germany

54. Paris, France

55. Vienna, Austria

56. Rome, Italy

57. Rome, Italy

58. Salisbury, United Kingdom

59. Lucerne, Switzerland

60. Sintra, Portugal

61. … 81 The Netherlands, for the Art in Flowers special collection

82. Vienna, Austria

83. Maui, Hawaii, USA

84. Vienna, Austria

85. Vienna, Austria

86. Blois, France

87. Fontainebleau, France

88. Lucerne, Switzerland

89. Obertraun, Austria

90. O’ahu, Hawaii, USA

91. Rome, Italy

92. Salzburger Land, Austria

93. Delft, Netherlands

94. Rome, Italy

95. Kauai, Hawaii, USA

96. Gstaad, Switzerland

97. London, Great Britain, UK

98. Lake Walen, Switzerland

99. Hallstatt, Austria

100. Paris, France

101. Washington state, USA

102. The Bernese Highlands, Switzerland

103. Normandy, France

104. Honolulu, Hawaii, USA

105. Stirling, Scotland, UK

106. Loire Valley, France

107. Windsor, Great Britain, UK

108. Rome, Italy

109. Bavaria, Germany

110. Zermatt, Switzerland

111. Volendam, Netherlands

112. Vienna, Austria

113. Tyrrhenian Sea, Italy

114. San Francisco, California, USA

115. Auxerre, France

116. Bay of Naples, Italy

117. Florence, Italy

118. Washington state, USA

119. Vienna, Austria

120. Lazio Italy

About Hui Cha Stanek

Erstwhile Photographer and Long-time Publisher Hui Cha Stanek has always been the woman behind the scenes. She has managed the day-to-day operations of Stanek Media for the past three decades. Her work has been featured in a number of gallery shows and recently in a career retrospective with her husband. She prefers candid street photography and photography of people (though not traditional portrait work). One of her most famous works, Tip Toe I See You, is shown below.

Others, not to be missed:

Salt Water Taffy

Let Me See Too

My Hair Day Too Mom

Where Did it Go

You'll find these fine art photography works and more at:

https://www.pictorem.com/gallery/360.Studios?cat=10605&iframe=1

About William Robert Stanek

Seattle-based Photographer and Artist, William Robert Stanek, is a combat veteran who supports other veterans, is also a vocal champion of books and libraries. Not only an artist, he wrote nonfiction for over three decades as William Stanek and fiction as Robert Stanek. Find his fine art photography and prints from his original oil paintings in his online studios:

360 Studios - https://www.pictorem.com/gallery/360.Studios

1North Studios - https://www.pictorem.com/gallery/1north

Studio 24 - https://www.pictorem.com/gallery/24

Robert Stanek Studios - https://www.pictorem.com/gallery/robert.stanek

Connecting to his roots in his work is important to Robert. The beautiful fine art print that follows is a view of Mont St. Michel in Normandy France, part of Robert's popular, limited A Day at Mont St. Michel photo series. Special to Robert as this is the region where his French ancestors are from--an ancestry Robert has traced back from Quebec Canada to its origins in France.

Find William Robert's books at

Walmart https://walmart.com/c/brand/robert-stanek

Barnes & Noble https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/%22Robert%20Stanek%22

Google Play https://play.google.com/store/search?q=robert%20stanek&c=books

Apple iTunes https://books.apple.com/us/author/robert-stanek/id55535880

Amazon https://www.amazon.com/stores/Robert-Stanek/author/B001K8IESG

Go Brandon, No Not That Brandon, the Other One, Brandon Sanderson

They ceaselessly trashed Robert Stanek’s books and career for being self-published, now some of same helped Brandon Sanderson raise $20M to self-publish. The irony is not lost on me, nor is the fact that Brandon Sanderson is being praised for operating his own publishing company while some of the same spent years not only trashing Stanek’s career but also ensuring his publishing company couldn’t compete in the marketplace. The two-decades of background on all this abounds here, on readindies.blogspot.com and on Stanek’s sites, go read it.

Stanek and his family (for those who have a conscience, these
are the people whose lives you destroyed)

How dangerous Robert Stanek's ideas must have been, how perilous Robert Stanek's stories to their egos, to have now spent two decades stomping them into the ground. Robert Stanek has said all along they were being paid to do the deeds, and indeed they have been for the past two decades. I guess they believe the deed is done now so they can openly show their true colors. To that we say not so fast, we haven’t forgotten who you are, nor will we, nor will anyone we know. We know who you are and what you’ve done.

And meanwhile, the world of Ruin Mist is not going anywhere. The books remain in print. Readers can continue to enjoy them in editions for adults and children. Kids and teens start with The Kingdoms & The Elves of the Reaches 1 - 4 and then continue on to In the Service of Dragons 1 - 4. Afterward, read Breathe of Fire and Living Fire, the prequels, and The Dragon, The Wizard and The Great Door.

Adults, read Keeper Martin's Tale, Kingdom Alliance, Fields of Honor and Mark of the Dragon. Next, read Dragons of the Hundred Worlds, the prequel to the Ruin Mist Chronicles, and then Guardians of the Dragon Realms.

The graphic novel, A Daughter of Kings, answers many of the behind the scenes questions, as do the companion books, Illustrated Encyclopedia of Ruin Mist, Keeper Martin’s Guide to the Fantastical Beasts and Faerie Peoples of Ruin Mist, The Art of Ruin Mist: Heroes & Villains.

Read the Ruin Mist books if only because these people are so desperate for you not to that they’ve spent TWENTY YEARS and MILLIONS tearing down one of the great writers of our time. If not for you, fine, move on… If you love them though, like we do, tell the world about them and piss off those who think they can do whatever they want to whoever they want without consequences.

Emily, Cathy, Shannon

PS

This post is not about anything Brandon Sanderson has done personally. It is, however, about what those in his orbit have done. Cathy and I are readers of Mr. Sanderson's books. - Emily

Amazon Still Has a Review Problem. A Solution That Could Actually Resolve It.

A visit to Amazon will take you to lots of products with oodles of reviews and the problem is that it's extremely likely most of these reviews are bogus. What percentage? Estimates vary widely, but my research says about 60% or so. Simply mentioning this fact, as I have for many years, makes me a target for those who make their living at this—whether they are merchants selling products or those who make a living by writing product reviews.

Sure, there are sites that purport to help you determine whether a product’s reviews are legit. Generally, these sites use automation and a series of algorithmic rules to try to spot fake reviews. Try is the operative word because such rules wrongly identify real reviews as fake quite frequently. Why? Because if you can write an automation rule to identify a fake review, the cheats have already worked around it and changed their tactics. What’s left then are real customers who get flagged for no reason. Just ask anyone who’s had their account removed for simply saying in their reviews something like: “Good. I liked it.” over and over.

Years ago, Amazon unveiled Verified Purchase as a way to determine whether a customer actually purchased a product before reviewing it. Amazon wants so very much for customers to believe this tag confirms that a review is genuine, so much so that a product review click now only shows verified reviews by default. Amazon also limits the number of unverified reviews a person can write on any given day.

The problem is the professional cheats were already ensuring review writers were buying products well before Amazon even unveiled Verified Purchase. And after that? Even the amateurs started making sure as many reviews as possible had Verified Purchase. Whether pro or amateur, those who do this know verified reviews sell more products than unverified reviews and they buy products just so they can review them.

It’s important to point out that reviews, whether real or fake, are written by real people and generally speaking real people can be robotic and repetitive just like cheats can. Real people can be creatures of habit too, meanwhile cheats can actively seek to work around detection by avoiding repetition or doing whatever else it takes.

After misidentifying so many real reviews as fake, causing substantial harm and alienating customers for so long, Amazon decided to take the fight directly to paid review writers, a key source of questionable reviews. Hence, the big announcements and legal actions in 2015 against several thousand paid reviewers who advertised at a site called Fiverr.

NOTE: Fiverr is a site where anyone can sell a service for $5 and up, and a service performed for a buyer is called a gig.

Before related gigs were pulled from the site, a simple search for “amazon reviews” would have displayed links that brought you to pages where you could see the gigs being offered for review writing and the sellers. There were thousands, some with hundreds of orders in the queue, as fake reviews were big business at Fiverr. Based on orders in queue, reviews from purported buyers, etc, it was easy to see that collectively these sellers were responsible for millions of paid reviews.

Clearly, the action was a big statement for Amazon. The problem is there are hundreds of millions of fake reviews, not just a few million. Most come from individuals, not professional review writers. These amateur fakes are written by regular people for a variety of reasons. They can be people a product seller knows personally, whether family, friends or simply a bunch of Facebook acquaintances. They can be other product sellers who are working together to help each other sell more. They can be complete strangers incentivized by gift cards or something else. Hate seems to work very well as a motivator.

NOTE: My opinion on paid reviews is here at readindies.blogspot.com. In a nutshell, who cares if a book has ONE paid review, whether a $5 one from Fiverr or a $575 one from Kirkus. Why is one not okay and the other okay? The real problem all along was and is this: paid reviews are being purchased by the TENS and HUNDREDS for ONE product; friends & fam reviews are being written by the TENS and HUNDREDS for ONE product too.

Head over to Facebook on any given day or any other site where sellers talk in forums and you’ll find groups of people using these tactics to get reviews of their products written. Why do they do this? Because reviews sell products. It’s that simple. Products with few or no reviews don’t sell, even though those products with few or no reviews likely represent the only honest ones you’ll ever find at Amazon or anywhere else online.

A simple solution that could actually resolve the review problem once and for all:

1.   Let all product sellers create rich product pages like Amazon has for its own products. The best products will then sell themselves.

2.   Separate the rich product page from the related reviews by moving related reviews to a separate page.

3.   Make the related reviews page accessible by clicking a “Customer Reviews” link at the top of the main product page. Otherwise, show only the star rating and the number of reviews/ratings on the product page.

Now gramma Sally and her knitting circle can write all the reviews they want of granddaughter Emma's epic folk operetta, the trolls who hate it can go nuts 1-starring it, and those who are actually shopping for a related product can use the rich product page to determine whether they want to do so without all the noise and drama.

In closing, did anyone see the movie Joy? Was I the only one aghast by the fact Joy's success was largely built on a relative calling in and giving a glowing product testimony on live television? In fact, if the movie version is true to life, Joy would have failed miserably otherwise and her entire empire would then never have happened. Something to think about should you want to chastise gramma Sally and her knitting circle friends.

Thanks for reading, I’m William Robert Stanek, Microsoft’s #1 author for nearly 20 years, and author of over 250 topselling books.

Odd Jobs on the Road: Random Thoughts About Family, Time & Money

A child of the '60s and '70s, I come from a family of five. Four girls and me. My dad, a wealthy business man who lived elsewhere and spent more time deciding which house or boat or car he was going to buy than with us kids, never paid a dime of support. While we walked around in patched clothes and duct-taped shoes and our bellies growled, he lived a life of leisure moving between his houses, buying cars for cross-country road trips, and motoring the Gulf of Mexico in one of his pleasure boats.

Growing up we weren’t just poor, we were nearly penniless. My mom worked odd jobs at times, here and there. She wasn’t an educated woman, but she tried when she was able and did what she could when the weight of her life didn't pull her down. During my childhood, that mostly meant cleaning rich people’s houses for a few dollars and sometimes a holiday bonus of $10 if we were fortunate.

What it was though was cash money. Cash money that mostly helped to keep a roof over our heads, if not always food in our bellies. My mom was too proud and stubborn to accept welfare or charity or at least that's my thoughts on the matter, though sometimes she wasn't coherent enough to understand her children were starving. During those blue times, I think she felt those things we didn’t have, even if it was food for our bellies, didn’t matter.

I thought it did though and even though I had older siblings who were gone as much as they were present, I felt it was my responsibility to help where I could. The first job of a sorts that I remember working was when I was seven or eight. My little sister helped sometimes, but mostly she just followed me around like little sisters do. My first job was easy: collecting soda bottles and junk other people discarded. The soda bottles went to the store for a refund on the deposit. The junk went to a neighbor who collected and fixed things. He paid cash money if I found something good, so I always looked for something good. His dimes and quarters were gold in my pocket.

By ten, my older siblings were out of the house and I was in the business of washing cars, raking lawns, cleaning windows and mowing grass when I could, and I remember being paid in quarters—when I got paid at all, because sometimes I just did things for free so I might get paid the next time. Those quarters, I took them to the store and bought a loaf of bread or a bag of flour when we had no food in the house to eat. Flour was something that was cheap and went far. (Mix flour with water and pour it in a skillet and you have an inexpensive pancake. A pancake that fills a belly.)

After we moved from the city to the country, I worked with my mom at auction houses and flea markets on weekends, holidays and during the summer and sometimes as a gardener’s helper. I loaded, packed and unpacked, fetched, did odd jobs for the auctioneer, my mom and others. At times, it was rather like my junk collecting business. My mom collected things, much bought in cheap, auctioned lots and sold as odds and ends at flea markets. Odds and ends that helped make the difference between having a roof and food, and not.

At fifteen, I got my driver’s license and drove around my mom’s old station wagon until I found work in a town a few miles away. I worked 30 hours a week until I graduated high school. Two things happened during high school that changed my life.

The first: My dad took a sudden interest in me and invited me down to the Gulf Coast to work for him. He was in the construction business and wanted to teach me the trade.

I suppose I should have been angry with him for all the lost years, but I wasn’t. I worked with him and his work crews the whole summer, doing roofing and siding. Long days in the unrelenting sun, up at five, quitting at sunset. But boy how we lived because when the sun got too hot to work outside--and it often did--we would go out to eat lunch at a restaurant. And when we came home in the evening, we came home to ready meals and plenty of drink all around. Weekends were events. Fishing rodeos. Road trips. Barbecues. It was a wild, rich life.

At the end of the summer, my dad gave me a 1970 Dodge truck, which he said was mine to keep as a bonus for the work I’d done. The truck though came with strings. He wanted me to stay and not return home to Wisconsin. Tempting as it was to stay, I couldn’t leave my mom and little sister behind.

I took the truck and drove the 960 miles home. A friend from my dad’s work crew went with me and we took turns driving. Getting the truck home meant I could get to work without taking the family car, and that let me work more hours.

The following summer, my dad invited me down to the Gulf Coast again. He said he’d bought me a car. A beautiful, black ’73 Ford thunderbird with a massive V8 engine—a classic car for the time (1982). It was any sixteen-year-old kid’s dream and it was mine too.

I worked with his crews doing roofing and siding, up at five, down at sunset. And we lived like kings. After the summer though, my dad again didn’t want to let me return home. He wanted me to stay and live with him. I couldn’t do that, but this time I was less worried about my mom than my little sister. I was the one who protected and watched out for her, and I’d already left her behind for two summers.

One morning, I went out for a drive and drove the 960 miles home. After that, I didn’t go back to the Gulf Coast. I stayed at home in Wisconsin and worked and went to school.

The second: During the early spring of my senior year, my mom moved away upstate with her new husband who she’d been dating and my little sister, leaving me to fend for myself. I lived in my car until I graduated, later with friends and others where I could. Even though I was a straight-A honor student who loved biology, physics and calculus as much as computers, I had no prospects after high school. I spent the summer after high school living with friends and sometimes in my car and working whenever I could.

Eventually, with nowhere to live and no means, I joined the Air Force, even though I was only 17. Along with acing my SATs in high school, I’d also aced the ASVAB (the military aptitude test), scoring the highest the recruiters had even seen: 98’s and 99’s in every category tested. So the military seemed a rather logical path for me to take when the choice became either live in a car or do something else.

A few months after I signed up, I drove the 176 miles up to Green Bay to visit my mom and sister, and to deliver what few possessions I had, mainly my car. The dodge truck, they already had and were using as their primary means of transportation.

Although I was supposed to head off in short order, I was able to delay until February. After boot camp, I attended the Defense Language Institute and specialty training in Intelligence that took me through my first 19 months in the military. From my paycheck, I sent home what I could to my mom (who was now divorced again). My first duty station was in Japan, so every few paychecks I also bought something I could send home. Things I knew my mother would love: fine china cups and plates, collectibles, and more. Everything my mother always liked from the auctions we worked together when I was a child, but much of which, I think, was later sold off little by little to pay for what was needed.

A problem with my mother was she didn’t know how to say no. If someone needed something, she gave what she could even if it sometimes meant going without herself. It was always like that though and even though I’ve helped pave my mother’s way for nearly all of my life, she still lived the meager life she always had before. Everything I gave her always seemed to be going out somewhere else, usually to one of my siblings who even when I helped pave their way still went to my mother for more to pay the rent or this or that bill or for airline tickets or to fix a car. I’ve always wondered where the takers thought the money came from—the money I sent my mom for her needs. Money enough to have bought houses and cars that is gone. Just gone. 

More musings next time on the Board of Education and Crazy Things My Mom Said That I Believed.

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this article, please share or comment.

Best,

Robert Stanek

Some people are the dog. Others, the tail on the dog. Or alternatively why I’m celebrating my 1000th+ title in active worldwide distribution.

Celebrating my 1000^th title in active distribution isn’t about numbers. It’s more about helping others understand today’s publishing reality. The reality of today’s working-class writers. In publishing today, a writer who sells a million copies of 1 or a few books is a superstar while a writer who sells millions of copies of many books over many years may not even be considered by some to be successful. That’s because the publishing industry is designed to recognize racing rabbits—those thoroughbred superstars who knock the covers off the ball and sell, sell, sell copies of a single book or a few books by the boatload. The publishing industry isn’t designed for the working-class writer—those tortoises who barely get in a few steps toward first base while the superstars are sliding in to home.

But this tortoise has news. You can be a tortoise and reach home plate too. It takes much longer, requires much more dedication, but it can be done.

Although I don’t have any single book that has sold a million copies, I do have many books that have collectively sold millions and have collectively been checked out of libraries millions of times as well. In fact, earlier this year, I celebrated the publication of my 150^th book. Well, at least the 150^th book I counted amongst a much larger number of books of mine that have been published since 1995. For you see, the working-class writer doesn’t have the luxury of writing a book a year or a book every 2 or 3 years. A working-class writer must write 3, 4, 5, or 10 books a year to pay the mortgage, to put the kids through college, to feed the beast.

Many books written for many years help to give tremendous breadth and depth to any working-class writer’s body of work. All those books released in various editions, as audio books and ebooks, as sets and compilations, and as translations into many languages over many years create mountains of active titles in distribution. When those mountains of titles begin to wag the tail on the dog, it no longer matters whether you are the dog or the tail on the dog because at that point you are the whole enchilada. You are the dog, the tail, the dog wagging the tail, and the tail wagging the dog.

My numbers would in fact make most publisher’s drool. I’ve never had a book that failed to sell. My books earn back their advances. My books have long legs and typically have steady sales year after year after year. And by sales I mean all purchases, downloads, check outs, etc that result in a reader getting a book to read. But my books sell collectively in a relative trickle.

When you look at all the various editions, formats, sets, compilations, and translations of my books and track those as individual titles, you find that I’ve had many thousands of titles published over the years. There are in fact over 1,000 active William Robert Stanek titles available right now today (and not including an additional 400 or so of my titles in the English language that don’t even have my name on them as they are sold under brand names). Online bookstores, like Amazon or Barnes & Noble, carry over 600 of my English language titles and there are over 900 of my English language titles in library distribution. You can check these numbers yourself by counting all the William Stanek, William R. Stanek, William Robert Stanek, and Robert Stanek English-language titles.

None of these titles individually is a blockbuster, but all of these titles sell. They sell in that relative trickle I spoke of a moment ago. (For a complete list of my books, read: Books by William Robert Stanek.)

A trickle that turns individual snowflakes into snowballs coming done a mountainside and snowballs into an avalanche that brings the mountain down and levels the playing field with the superstars of publishing. My publishers don’t like it when I give exact numbers, but consider this: if you count only 1,000 of my active titles and say those titles sell only a miniscule 1 copy a day on average, that’s still 365,000 books sold a year.

Being the tail on the dog’s not looking so bad after all. Is it?

Thanks for reading! For more about my 20-year career as a writer, read "How I Made This Crazy Thing Called Writing a 20-year Career."


Robert Stanek

Celebrating 35 years, 150 books and nearly 7.5 million readers. It's been a long run and a mostly great one. Join me and learn what it's like to be a writer.

Happy Holidays! You know you're in the right place in life when you wake up every day with a smile on your face. You know you're in the right place as a writer when that smile is because you're eager to get to the keyboard, eager to get the thoughts racing through your mind down on paper.

That eagerness to capture thoughts on paper has carried me through many days, many years, and many books. As a writer, that eagerness has made the blank page a friend rather than a foe. That blank page can be your friend too--if you let it. And if you let it, you can fill it with everything that's inside you, everything that you can wonder about, everything that you can dream about, and everything that you can imagine.

On my blogs, I've written about and featured the books of many authors who weren't afraid of that blank page either--or maybe they were but they figured out how to turn that fear into something magical, if only for a time. That magical thing being a filled page, a page of letters and words. Words that dance and sing. Words that make your heart swoon or soar. Words that make your thoughts chase the heavens or scatter to the winds. Words that make your very breath catch, slow or race.

My day job is as a tech writer, a job I've been doing full-time since 1996. You can learn more about my William Stanek books at http://www.williamstanek.com/. Windows 8 Pocket Consultant is one of my latest tech books.

Before I wrote tech books, I was in the military and I wrote a true account of my war-time service in a book called Stormjammers: The Extraordinary Story of Electronic Warfare in the Gulf War. The book isn't as popular as No Easy Day, but I'd like to think it just as vividly depicts the sacrifices of the men and women I served with in the Gulf War. Learn more about this book at http://stanek.reagentpress.com/.

I started my writing journey in 1986 when I penned Keeper Martin's Tale, the first Ruin Mist book and my first full-length novel. As an instant, indie bestseller, Keeper Martin's Tale shook trees and rattled cages when it debuted in print in 2002--and it's still shaking trees and rattling cages today. Journey to Ruin Mist by visiting http://www.ruinmistmovie.com/.

Another project I worked on for many years before publication is the tale of a big, little place called Bugville. Originally, I wrote the Bugville stories for my children who delighted in them so much they urged me to publish them for other children to enjoy. Buster's story begins with Visit Dad & Mom At Work, but I think it's more appropriate to share with you one of the the more recent stories. It's called Have a Spooktacular Halloween and it features Buster's friend Lass. Journey to Bugville by visiting http://www.bugvillecritters.com/.

If you decide to read my books, and I hope you do, one thing I hope you take with you afterward is the sense that anything's possible. You can dream. You can achieve dreams. All those years ago when I began writing, I had no idea where my dream would take me and yet I dared to dream because I believed the impossible was entirely possible. And, it is.

When I began writing stories in the 4th grade, I had no idea that 35 years later I'd be celebrating the upcoming publication of my 150th book or that nearly 7.5 million people would have read those books. Yet none of it would have been possible if I hadn't dared to dream. Got a dream? You can dare to dream too. And when that dream comes true give me a shout out. Tell the world Robert Stanek sent you.