Category Archives: Thoughts

Journal – the hard way

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Sometimes I enjoy doing things the hard way
The long, difficult way
By hand
Without electricity
Without advanced tools.
It connects me to the past
To ancient humans
Struggling to make ends meet
To those who worked hard perfecting a craft.
I tried to saw dovetails with hand tools
When I made my desk.
It was hard work.
It took days.
I was sore, my carpal tunnel flared
And when I finally tried to hammer the pieces together
It didn’t fit.
But I learned
how much work
Every piece of furniture should be.
I can appreciate
The ease of modern living
Machine made items shipped to your home.
I can appreciate too
What we’ve lost.
You forge a connection
With things you built
With food you grew, harvested, and processed.
Even doing something as simple as washing your car by hand
You learn more about the state that car is in
Notice its scratches and weak points
Restore the sparkles in its paint.

I processed five gallons of grapes by hand.
When I sat in my kitchen
Peeling grapes
I mimicked the motions of my ancestors.
Women have peeled grapes
Into bowls in their laps
For thousands of years.
They spent hours upon hours
Processing the bounty of summer
To stave off winter’s bite.
They told stories while working
Sang songs
And some just worked
Alone, in quiet thought.
Every grape I handled
Taught me more about this food.
I learned to tell a wormy one by feel
Its rough scar tissue
Sent a shudder through my marrow.
I learned what every color tastes like.
I learned to love the Concord smell
Rich and strong and sweet and tangy.
If I’d used tools
I wouldn’t have had to stand at the sink for so long.
I wouldn’t have had the quiet thinking time
I wouldn’t have been able to practice my working posture
Relaxed enough to fight fatigue, yet always moving.
I noticed I was taking much longer than necessary
Due to my need to get every grape, save every grape, not waste
Anything
And I knew someone watching me would have felt frustrated
Just as I felt
When I watched my mother process peaches for the freezer
Always graceful, always painfully slow, yet inevitable.
After two days of work
The peaches would be all blanched, peeled, sliced, sugared, and frozen.
I felt her echo in my slow fingers
Of her, and a million women before her
All of us preparing the harvest
So we might have something sweet
For winter.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What I’ve Learned in Swim Class

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How to swim (or, what I’ve learned in swim class):

 

Keep your head below water.

Be a fish. You love the water.

It’s fun to pull yourself through water. It’s like thick air. It’s like Jell-O.

Breathing is overrated and unnecessary.

Keep your goddamn head below water.

Pear-shaped people have a built-in pull buoy.

Make sure your swimsuit can handle your awkward maneuvers. Otherwise it might fall apart while you’re swimming, and then you’ll have to play it cool while diving for the lost strap.

Don’t stare at the instructor’s aging aquatic mammal body. One day you too will look this strange.

Feel the water with your forearms.

Aim your hands for the center of your fish line.

Keep your damn head below water.

Pull each stroke with your whole torso, not just your hands.

Think about every little motion.

But don’t think too much about it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Journal – on avoiding the news

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You know what I hate?
Politics.
I can’t look.
I avoid it because it makes me sick.
I don’t watch the news because it’s poison, twisted scenarios, biased accounts.
Is there even such a thing as truth?
Or is truth in the eye of the beholder?
Science cannot measure ethics.
Science cannot measure a human heart.
When people look into their own pasts,
All they see
Is what they need to believe.
Even history is a tenuous thing.
I know people who believe in history.
I can’t.
It is written by human hands, filtered through human hearts, wrung through the gossip machine over and over.

They say Ramses was king from such to such a year.
This is all the truth that remains.
What does that matter, what does it mean?
But there are patterns of truth
To a discerning eye.

I see the future
Because of history.
I know where we’re headed
Because of history.
There will be no apocalypse.
But the age of America’s empire
Is coming quickly to a close.
Our decay as a nation is imminent.
It will not happen suddenly
But it will happen faster than any other empire’s close.
Technology is a joining of hands.
It accelerates everything.
We learn faster, we forget faster.
We share language and culture faster.
We are running on fast forward.
People are jaded more quickly.
People can see the patterns
In their own behavior
Like they never could before.
And when America falls,
Many of those joined hands
Will be pulled down with it.
Amidst the chaos,
A dictator will rise.
We will choose security over freedom.
That is what humans choose
Every time.

The world will not end.
The world does not end.
Humanity can survive
Anything.
But we repeat our mistakes.
Sometimes we even worsen.

Yesterday was beautiful.
Our biggest problems
Were sexual harassment and bullying.
This was a mark
Of our success as a nation.

The cultural backlash
Is growing.
Xenophobia abounds.
People are getting shunted into camps
Driven away, caged.
Rights and freedoms for all are shrinking back
Into rights and freedoms for some.

I fear we have witnessed the peak.
Today begins the decay.
Maybe it’ll just be
A bigenerational thing
But this feels stronger.
I’m afraid.
I’m afraid our time is up.
We’re due for an economic depression
We’re due for a major war.

I’m not afraid of death.
I’m not afraid of poverty.
I’m afraid of my own inability to act.
The situation is disgusting
And those in power
Are equally disgusting.
Everything is disgusting.
It fills me with frustration.
Watching the news
Is just a shitshow.
We are watching ourselves
Flush ourselves down the drain.
There are millions of people
Who know how to fix it
Who want to fix it
Who cannot fix it.
I want to fix it
But stronger is my want
For personal freedom.
We might influence culture here and there as individuals
We might start a club, write a book, invent a tool
We can devote ourselves to a cause
And leave a small dent in evil.
But nothing brings true peace.
Every effort
Is futility.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Self publishing n’ stuff

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I’m supposed to be writing right now, but all I can think is zzzzzzz…. I went swimming today and am plumb tuckered.

Oh, I know! Here’s a semi-educational email I wrote today to a friend. It never fails to amaze me, the things I find tucked away in my brain. When I was a kid, my favorite thing to do was empty out my pockets and see what treasures I’d collected over the course of the day. When people ask me questions and I actually have answers, it’s the same feeling, hahaha.

Would you recommend any particular self-publishing service?

 

I recommend Smashwords… it’s the only publishing service I know, though. It’s free and they distribute it to lots of other platforms. You’ll have to go through your book and do a fair amount of work to make sure it meets their epub formatting guidelines. They give you lots of advice on how to do that properly. Even though it distributes to about 30 small mysterious websites I’ve never heard of, the only place where I’ve sold books are the Smashwords site, Barnes and Noble, Kindle, and iBooks. I had to sign my book up for Kindle separately from Smashwords, though. For some reason they didn’t have that one as a distributor.

If you’re serious about this you’ll want to investigate the pros and cons of some other sites. I’ve never done that so…

I had to break a few hearts and lose a couple potential readers because I didn’t have a print version of the book. Maybe one day… but right now it’d just be a fiscal calamity. There might be some bind-on-demand kind of places but I really haven’t looked into that, either.

 

What, if anything, can I do to promote a book?

 

Make sure you have a fantastic cover, and a really good micropitch to draw them in. You can pull views to the publishing page, but this is where they’ll get asked for money, and have to actually make their decision. Be careful not to mislead them in any way about the nature of the book; if you draw the wrong kind of audience who are expecting something else, they’ll hate your book no matter how good it is.

YOU GET WHAT YOU GIVE. If you want to actually make money, you’re going to have to put in lots of man-hours. Touch as many people as you can with the links. Put links to the book in your email signature, sign off your online comments and posts with it. Find websites with likely readership and mention your work there. If you have a fearless and winning personality, you could take advantage of local opportunities, too. Little writer’s conventions and clubs abound. You could contact some bookstores or libraries and ask if they want a copy, or if you can do a reading in a coffee shop. Set up a stand on the sidewalk. Pass out business cards. Leave flyers on bulletin boards. Really maximize your efforts by finding the haunts of your niche audience and appealing to them there.

Eliminate obstacles for potential readers. Make your websites, links, etc VERY clear. Think in this way: you want the LEAST amount of clicks necessary for them to get to your book.

Build up suspense and momentum with a promised release date. Get as many people excited about this as you can, maybe build an email list or webpage for it. I failed at this when I tried to do it, but they say it makes a difference.

One thing I want for me is to get a couple more books up there. The more books you have, the more of an audience you’ll get, right? I read about this one girl who had a big string of 20 vampire novels she’d written for fun. She self-published them and people got addicted. If they bought one, they got addicted and bought a bunch more. She made a killing. Of course that’s a crazy popular genre anyway, or at least it was at the time.

Um… that’s about all I know for sure in this area. Marketing is where I’m failing right now, because I’m so damn lazy.

Social media is a big deal for a reason. Big possibilities for promotion with that. Big… possibilities. Go investigate. I don’t really know. You can use FB, Twitter, Youtube, Reddit, WordPress, Instagram, Pinterest, Patreon, Kickstarter, Ko-Fi, etc all to great effect if you apply different principles to each one (I recommend you look up and check out each one of these if you haven’t investigated them before). Once again, this requires a time investment and I’m not sure about the exact application for each, because I don’t want that much shit in my life right now.

 

Is there some level of sales that I can reasonably expect?

 

Once again… you get what you give.

Honestly, I wouldn’t expect a whole lot. Unless you put in all that consistent work to promote it.

I put my book up on March 2016. I’ve sold a grand total of… drumroll… 29 books. I’ve had 102 sample downloads, so that’s actually a pretty good (almost 1/3) view-to-purchase ratio, and I’m proud. Like I said… not doing a great job of marketing this book.

From your personal network of friends, family, and blog audience, I’d expect maybe 5% to buy. Email lists are supposed to be a great resource. If you send an email blast to your blog email followers, and the book is written in the genre they expect (i.e. just like your blog), then a slightly higher percentage from there will buy.

Please don’t force anyone to read it. You’ll just upset them and get weird feedback.

 

The end, goodnight.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Humbled

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So I’m sitting here, writing, in my angry place. About suicide, the state of the nation, all these deep poems. Trying to decide which terrible thing to post. 

Then I get a group text from my sister. It’s a gibberish link.

She does not stay up late at night. She does not use ellipses, ordinarily. And she does not send links. She’s not really techy at all. She doesn’t even open the links we send to her!

Spam spam spam spam spam.

I tell her she’s not being herself, and to change her password. My sister didn’t respond. Everyone in the thread considers themselves lucky not to have clicked it (except the one person who did and it didn’t load).

The preview said “dogapillar in my back yard.”

The group is disappointed that we can’t click on this enticing link. We try to find adequate replacements in GIFs. No dogapillars, unfortunately. Caterpillars, cat caterpillars, and old men with caterpillar mustaches. Images abound. Nothing can fill the need. We didn’t know we had this need until we weren’t allowed to see it.

Then she messages again and says that she really did send it. This was it: 

Dogerpillar-in-the-backyard8230-428cf1

 

So was sparked much discussion on what the appropriate time and syntax is for sending pictures of dogapillars. Should there be a code word to accompany it so we know it’s a legit dogapillar photo? More related GIFs and photos were exchanged.

At long last, the discussion was concluded, and bedtime announced. 

I got back to my poetry rant. It looked so self-important and… small. I can’t post this shit. I have a hard enough time taking myself seriously as it is. Nothing compares to long, ridiculous dogapillar-centric conversations. I have been fully outmatched.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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