Barry Ahern's Blog

In response to a very enjoyable re-occurring theme, I’m going to offer a little background to some of the worlds in the Birthright series. As Dangermaze is the most recently published, the world that sticks out the most to me is the World of Pain. It is part of a tri-world system including the World of Happiness and the World of Anger. The dynamic between these worlds is simple, you reside in the world of the emotion that dominates you. As abstract and as crazy as this sounds, it’s not that much different than real life. Physically we live in the same world, but within our minds we all live in our own worlds. The World of Pain is a dreary place of constant production. People working away diligently to distract themselves from that unresolved pain lurking at the front of their minds. Sadly sometimes people never recover from this state of suspended anguish, and select to live a life of pregnant distress. In fact after swapping messages with Mo Gawdat, author of the book “Solve for Happy: Engineer Your Path to Joy” he made the distinction between pain and suffering. Pain being an event the world gives you that may not match your hopes, while suffering the selection to dwell on that event, constantly regenerating it in your head to regenerate the pain. This is the World of Pain, a place where we end up imprisoning ourselves. The World of Anger on the other hand is a lawless unadulterated landscape of aggression and sharp words. We’ve all been there (road rage!!), and sometimes with good cause, but living in this place is a different story. And lastly, the World of Happiness, a place contrary to how it sounds is not a place of people with happy stories. It is a place of people who try to choose to be positive. Don’t get me wrong, this is exceptionally difficult, especially if like most people you have your own demons. However, it is a case of either trying to make the best of things, or it’s a matter of flipping back and forth between your other options. The hope is that everyone has at least 1 thing that keeps them connected to the World of Happiness.

Ok, so I've never written a blog, but I do talk to myself a lot which turns out not to be that much different than having a blog. This week was both exciting and very interesting. I ran a promotion on Freebooksy and ended up with about 2000 downloads and a number 1 spot on amazon for a short while. This was the exciting part.. the interesting part was that in order to keep your ranking, reviews of your book on amazon seem to be like a type of "life blood" for your books sustained popularity. Without reviews, as soon as the promotion ended, my ranking slowly, actually, pretty quickly seemed to climb up to the numbers that I am much more familiar with. I guess this is something I never really thought of before but more than obvious when you think about it. Fingers crossed a couple of good reviews trickle in from the downloads !!