When I was a kid in first grade, everyone else knew each other from preschool. For the first two weeks, I was beaten up every day — by those who later became my best friends.
At some point in our lives, we are all the new kids somewhere. The first day at university, at a new job, or a sports club is intimidating. Everyone already knows what the rules are and what codes you need to know to avoid getting into trouble. Only you don’t know anything yet. We don’t know anyone, and the old hands eye us with suspicion.
A lesson from childhood
When I was seven years old, my parents moved me from a small village to a big city over a hundred kilometers away from everything I knew.
My parents had decided to send me to…
Especially at the beginning of an author’s career, many people save themselves the trouble of setting up an extra account for the income and expenses from their work as an author. But there are three good reasons why you should.
I’m still glad I opened a business bank account before I uploaded my first novel to Amazon. There was rarely more than a few euros in that account for the first four years because my books sold no more than three times a month.
Today, several thousand euros go into that account every month. I also pay cover designers, editors, advertising, taxes, and other things related to my work as an author from this account. …
You should not even try.
When Ray Kurzweil talks about the singularity, he means a point in time in the distant future. The day of the singularity is when artificial intelligence will be superior to the human mind on all levels for the first time. From that time on, we will no longer have a chance to understand the world’s rapid changes.
As far away as this day may be for humankind, it is already today no longer possible to keep up with all relevant changes in the world for the individual human being.
We all live our lives as if the world is still…
When I’m writing the final chapters of a book, everything else has to wait.
It’s important to know which of your projects is your primary job, which is your side job, and which only has the potential to replace one of the first two.
For me, the order is clear. My main job is writing thrillers and crime novels. That’s how I earn most of my money.
My side job is writing erotic short stories under a pen name. This project has turned into a lucrative sideline in just a few months and has the potential to become much more lucrative for me in the future.
And then there’s writing on Medium. Initially, I…
And if so, what is it doing there? I have three perfectly reasonable explanations for this
This morning I came home from the bakery and was looking forward to our breakfast together. My wife and I love fresh buns. A day that starts without buns and coffee is a day lost.
For a few weeks now, we’ve had a new favorite: pumpkin seed hazelnut buns.
The pumpkin seeds are toasted and are on the buns’ top surface, while the hazelnuts are incorporated into the dough. The hazelnuts are barely chopped. So sometimes you have to chew hard.
That’s why I wasn’t surprised at first when I bit down on something very hard after the first bite…
In September 2019, my wife and I visited the world-famous ruins of Pompeii. We walked the paths of the past and found… A penis.
When you study sunken civilizations’ culture, you expect to see impressive architecture, archaic artwork, and other high-culture artifacts. But the people of earlier cultures were not all artists, warlords, or master builders. Most of them were ordinary people, and ordinary people have ordinary needs.
In the lavishly restored ruined city of Pompeii at the foot of Mount Vesuvius, which destroyed the city in 79 A.D., there is much evidence of the everyday life of ordinary citizens.
The tourist guide showed us public drinking fountains, paved streets optimized for horse-drawn vehicles, and even street food restaurants, as we would call them…
Do you know how much time you spend staring at screens every day instead of being productive?
I make my living producing text. Therefore, every minute I’m not working is a minute lost. Of course, I need time to relax, and I need to take regular breaks. But when I’m sitting at the computer, I should be working.
In recent weeks, I have noticed that my productivity has been creeping down. I wasn’t getting as much done in the day as I used to. My energy was also lower than it should be. For a long time, it wasn’t clear to me what was going on.
But the day before yesterday, a notification suddenly popped up on…
You cost the author real money if you do.
Lately, I’ve seen a really annoying phenomenon more and more. I publish a new story, share the link on Manystories, Linkedin, and Facebook, and put up a tweet on Twitter. Then I wait half an hour and click on the article’s statistics to see how well it is received.
Often, the new article already has a few views. This is initially pleasing, but the very next moment, I see that there have been no reads yet. The mood is immediately at the bottom again. But it is only when I look at the last column of the statistics that I…
Victim mentality leads to frustration and hatred. Take responsibility and get your life back.
It’s five o’clock in the morning, and the alarm clock rings. I have to be at the office in two and a half hours. I hate this job where I have to do what my boss says. I have to sit in front of the computer for at least eight hours every day and do work that means nothing to me.
The money I get is too little to afford an apartment or a car. If my wife didn’t earn twice what I make per month, I would be a working poor.
Every day I spend at least an hour…
I need advice from Dogecoin experts
I have no idea about cryptocurrencies. But since I missed the hype that pushed Bitcoin to an all-time high, I naturally wonder if I can afford to ignore the topic of cryptocurrencies in the long run.
Then yesterday, for the first time in my life, I read an article about Dogecoin. A Dogecoin can be bought for a fraction of a dollar or euro and has increased in value by over 600% within a month.
Apparently, activity on Reddit and tweets from celebrities like Snoop Dog and Elon Musk have led to this jump in price. Currently, the price for…
René Junge
Thriller-author from Hamburg, Germany. Sold over 200.000 E-Books. get informed about new articles: http://bit.ly/ReneJunge
