Slope of Hope Blog Posts

Slope initially began as a blog, so this is where most of the website’s content resides. Here we have tens of thousands of posts dating back over a decade. These are listed in reverse chronological order. Click on any category icon below to see posts tagged with that particular subject, or click on a word in the category cloud on the right side of the screen for more specific choices.

First Five of Solid State

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I’ve been very pleased at the reception of my novel Solid State, which I’ve been publishing in a serialized form over on Substack. Folks seem to like getting a bite-sized chapter each day. I’ve broken up this monster of a tale into 73 (!!!) chapters, which will be emailed for free every weekday until the end of the year.

If you want to catch up, please do so – – here are the links to the first five chapters, all of which tumbled out this past week.

A Chapter Opens

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Welcome to the big week, everyone! Yes, it’s the week when, for the first time in four years, the overlords at the Federal Reserve will deign to grant the public an interest rate cut of an either meaningless 25 basis points or an equally as meaningless 50 basis points. This will be the start of a long series of cuts which, over the course of time, the public will eventually realize are a desperate bid to cure a failing economy as opposed to some kind of gift from the mendacious and self-serving Jerome Powell.

Of all the big events that we face on a regular basis, such as jobs reports and CPI reports, I find the FOMC Day to be the most annoying of them all, because the market is locked in a state of suspended animation for 2.5 days until it happens mid-Wednesday, and then all holy hell breaks loose, both up and down, after Powell issues his release and, much worse, yammers on at the podium.

Typically, the market rallies as Powell is doing his little dance, invariably doing a swan dive the next day once the booze wears off. It’s always a tremendous relief when one of these eight scheduled FOMC performances is totally done.

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Solid State Substack

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In 1982, I wrote my first book, and I went on to write two dozen more. All of these were put out by large publishing houses, but all of them were non-fiction works about computers and trading. Now, I have finished my first novel, Solid State, but instead of going about the normal route, I am going to publish it myself on Substack, releasing one (short!) chapter every weekday starting on September 16th and running until the end of 2024. I hope you will subscribe and enjoy it, as there will be no charge for doing so. I look forward to hearing what you think!

Literary Agent Saga

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Before I even start into this best-of-Slope post, I’ll come right out and say it: if you are (or know of) someone in the world of literary agents or publishing, I’d love to hear from you. By the end of this post, I think you’ll see why! So here we go.

I’ve been a professional writer since I was a teenager. I wrote for national magazines at 15, had my first published book at 16, and by the time I was 25, I had written that many books (that is to say: 25). They were all books about computers, and I was financially independent by the time I was in my late teens. Getting published was very easy, because almost every book proposal I came up with was accepted. I had no agent. Just myself.

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