Greetings, Steemit community.
It was @dollarvigilante and @clif that brought me here who I follow on Twitter, in the blogosphere, and in their numerous podcast and video appearances. Being a dabbler in cryptocurrency, I'd heard of steem before but wasn't really sure what it was about. They sold me on it. I don't know either guy personally (though Clif and I banter a bit time to time), but I like what they have to say.
As chance should have it, I'm winding up a book on my experience here in China. I've been teaching English here for 13 years and have had some pretty incredible adventures, mostly while not teaching.
The book I'm finishing up now I can thank Tim Binnall of Binnall of America (BoA) for. He was doing a series of international shows on paranormal phenomena around the world and wanted to include China and Japan in his Pacific Rim sweep. Finding a guy in Japan was easy for Tim because there's a guy based in Japan who writes regularly for some such website. But China, having been closed for so many years and only recently opened, it's internet being largely domestic, and there being a language barrier, AND paranormal topics not being as popular over here as elsewhere, it was harder to locate someone.
Fortunately for Tim he had two fans over here: a guy we'll call John and me. We went to work trying find a person with good enough English and an interest in high strangeness that would do the show. We couldn't find anyone, not even a Taoist master to weave tales of supernatural powers and immortality. "John" suggested I do it. Since I speak in front of groups every day and had acting training, I'd be a natural he averred.
So I sent a list of topics I could cover to Tim and a few months later we did a show together that was longer and better than anything either of us imagined. We were just trying to fill a slot in the programs. If interested, you can listen to it here.
After the show part of the conversation, Tim suggested I write a book about my adventures and the other tales I've collected (all allegedly true). The problem was at the time I was writing a book on English. But now Tim's suggestion will soon be realized. He said he could help me publish it because he has such an illustrious roster of guests and popular writers on his show all the time, and indeed he does. I recommend listening if high strangeness peppered with man talk, beer, drugs and humor is your thing.
Then our correspondence became sporadic as Tim had to make important changes in his life. So while I waited things out I thought I might look for a publisher on my own, and it was in the past weeks while doing that the aforementioned gentlemen (with poetic license) got me onto steemit.
So it was while exploring the website here it struck me: Shit. If I can earn here, and this seems to be the wave of the future, why not just put my book up here a chapter at a time and see how it does? Why do things the old-fashioned way? It might even be a Steemit first. The first non-fiction SteemBook. Why not? Even if it’s not the first, it’ll be among the first, for sure. (Since writing the first draft of this post I did find some users writing what could be called fiction SteemBooks, but I still think I might be the first to coin “SteemBook”).
My SteemBook is called 10,000 Years of Strangeness: A Paranormal Primer for Ancient and Modern China.
I’ll begin posting in a few days. Still need to do a little formatting and photo uploads and such, but that’s the plan! I’m not a tech head by any means, so don’t expect anything fancy in appearance. I just hope you like the stories.
I welcome all steem users to read, comment and vote as it goes up, and make the first (or one of the first) SteemBooks a reality. We can change writing, change the way books are published, and change the whole frikkin’ world while we’re at it. Thank you Tim, Clif, and Jeff.
And Tim, if you’re reading, still got a place in Shenzhen and about a half billion hot Asian chicks waiting.