On January 10th, 2015, a “Friends and Family Tell-All Challenge” was a placed bet on the future of my return to my original hometown, Dallas, Texas. The bet was easy to do and as such:

If I score 50 downloads, I will return to California. Since it is important that I go through California to return to South Korea, I thought that I could spend a few days between other cities to vist any and all friends living in the state to include: San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco for example.

Scoring 100 will land me into New York, where it will be my first time ever stepping foot in-state, as well as a monumental moment in time for me, as I enlisted in the Marine Corps due to the attacks on the World Trade. I feel that I owe it to myself to be at the place of such event, and besides, it’s NEW YORK!

Scoring 1000 downloads, a seemingly tough feat compared to the other requirements, will finally get me home. I have been living in South Korea for over a year now, and so many friends and family want me to come home. I thought, maybe they will participate and go crazy over this challenge for two reasons. Firstly, no one from where I am from is doing anything in life like writing a book, and I was sure that they would have shared such a thing with their friends and family. Secondly, it’s me writing this book. A project of this magnitude deserves some kind of attention, and I was hoping that with the big handful of friends and family that I have, that they would convince at least 2 or 3 people each to download my digital book, even if they were never planning on reading it because… well… it’s ME that wrote it! Such an accomplishment like getting 1000 downloads should be easy with a guy with a HUGE family.

Did it happen? Well, that’s where the news comes in!

Between the release of the Spanish BETA Verses preview and January 28th, I was unable to get past 300 downloads. At some point, I used my Twitter page to grab over 100 downloads from recreational fiction readers. Then, I advertised the Spanish BETA to a Spanish-speaking audience to get about 200 downloads. I didn’t get any feedback from friends or family about them talking directly to their friends, and there was a total lack of shared posts regarding my project. Well, maybe there were about 3 Yscariot-related posts per week. However, I still failed to reach enough downloads in a two week period after those first few days. So what I did about 48 hours ago from now was pull the plug on the challenge and preemptively deemed the challenge a FAILURE! A few factors may have interrupted the challenge. For one, my brother’s wife spawned a beautiful baby and … I actually do not know any legitimate reason why my other family and friends failed to spread the word… Perhaps, it was that everyone was sharing the same IQ-lowering viral videos and images over and over and over again. And this is not part of the good or bad news. So you ask, “what’s the news?”

Okay… okay… now for the GOOD NEWS!
I took the ball and managed to get over 1000+ downloads for my new preview book Yscariot™: Delta Verses! I was amazed that this all took place in less than 48 hours! And now you ask… “is there anything else?” Well…

I’m afraid I’ve got some BAD NEWS!

Due to pulling the plug on the challenge (and that I was self-sufficient in getting 1000+ downloads on the Spanish BETA Verses and the new Delta Verses), I will NOT be returning to Dallas anytime during the year 2015. Thank you all for reading my latest post! ❤