John D Reinhart

De-Energizing Anti-Inertia

Time rolls like a jelly-roll, right down the hill with the biological waste-matter, for we all know poop rolls down hill. That’s why your boss can give you dreadful assignments with such cheerful abandon, because poop lands on the desks of bosses with the express goal of rolling down the hill to your desk. If you are a boss, good on ya, mate, because you can roll your poop to the next level below. But I digress.

Time and energy are inextricably intertwined. Don’t think so? Why don’t you drive at 85 mph down the interstate when you’ve got six hours to get there…unless you are one of THOSE, who can’t drive 55… was that Sammy Hagar? Wasn’t he horrible? Or was that Hagar the Horrible, who drove too fast in the… but I digress.

What stands between you and your finished work – and by finished I don’t mean lookee there, Slim, I rot me a boook! – I mean a finished and produced piece that, if not published, is well down that road. In fact, let’s take it a half-mile farther down the road and say your work is not finished until it is published, and easily accessible by the world at large.

Wow. That’s a big goal. You took the time and heart and effort to write your book, didn’t you? Good on ya, mate! That’s your heart and your art, and, even though we tell our friends and admiring toadies that it was tons of work, you know in your artistic heart that it was fun. Go ahead, admit it. We probably won’t tell.

There was so much inertia to get the book done – day after tedious day (wink) of writing to tell the story, get those characters’ voices out there- be free, my creepy inner friends – with a single goal in mind: The End.

Publishing it. We-heh-heh-heh-ell, now, that’s just a whole new kettle of friskies, in’it? How do you do it? My proofreader moved on before he finished my book – well worth the nothing I was paying him, I say. An editor? An EDITOR? Those cost around a thousand bucks, my ramen-eating friend. And then, say we finally get the thing proofed and plop down half of the house payment and get it edited: crickets.

I came of age in the business world – you probably did, too. We know how to get things done, you and I. Mimeograph this, would you? Did you order more ribbons for the Selectric? Can you smell the ditto machine? Publishing… oy, now, that’s going to use our business acumen, and other parts of the egg.

All the inertia is lost. A wide set of skid marks veer off the shoulder and into the bushes on the other side of the ditch. Maybe it’s off the road, or maybe it’s running down some hidden lane only the driver knows. Whichever way it’s going, it aint towards success.

The hardest part of this book-writing exercise is the now, right here. The thing is done, but there is nowhere to go with it. I’ll let you know if I get out of the bushes.

Vile Betrayer Marketing Guru

Back in the good old days, before color TV, rulers declared themselves despots, and tossed out anybody who didn’t agree with them. Those disagreers were labeled “vile betrayer”, and, boom, off they went to the desert on good days, off went their heads on bad.

“Be gone, vile betrayer,” was a pretty common phrase, back in the good old nasty despot days, so I’m told.

In marketing your book, you get to be a despot – a marketing despot. It’s a cool title, like those honorary doctorate degrees that colleges hand out to folks who chip in a bunch of money to build a new teacher’s lounge with a gymnasium attached. Except that this title has power to it.

For one thing, you can brand as vile betrayers those people who tell you that you should be writing with crayons. Be gone, vile betrayer. Or those who tell you they’ve read better material on the artificial butter tub. Be gone, vile betrayer. Or those who just simply tick you off – you there, with the white socks and Birkenstocks – you are worse than a vile betrayer. Be oh so gone.

As the marketing despot of your book, you have to have an iron will – or an iron George if Will isn’t around – to keep the success of your book foremost in your mind, in front of the windmills. You must cast out as non-believers those who don’t believe in your success, because, well, shucks, they’re non-believers – I guess that just sort of follows.

Why must you be so iron-willed (or Georged) despotic? Two answers:

You must be iron willed because you, and only you, are the champion of your book. If not you, whom?
You must be iron willed because faith is a tentative and fragile thing. And, really, all you have is faith that your book is marketable, is fantastic, and is something truly special. That it is your gift to the world.

The marketing guru chosen for MARIGOLD’S END turned out to be a vile betrayer. A non-believer. A nay-sayer. A neer-do-well-cad. A nervous Nellie. Be gone, vile betrayer, and take your encyclopedia-selling mindset with you. Be thankful you’re not banished to… to… well, banished! Be gone!

This is your chance to be the ruler you’ve always known you should be. YOU can take your book to stellar heights. YOU can build a literary empire. YOU could RULE the WORLD!!!

Or, maybe you should just concentrate on selling your book.

Yeah. Probably that.

Hissy-Fit Marketing

Nothing beats a good hissy-fit. You know the kind, where you pull your hair and stomp your feet and get so red in the face people think you’re a thermometer? That’s a really effective way to scare off bears and stray pussycats. I tried it at the office… not so effective there. I guess I can sort of kiss that raise goodbye.

But a wild hissy-fit might just be the thing that puts your book over the top. What would happen if, like, you started getting into the world’s grille about something – racism, climate change, dirty diapers, you get the drift – and made some sort of a big hissy-fit. Your fit gets on YouTube, you go viral, and, oh, hey, you also wrote a novel that now we all have to read because, goodness, what a vibrant person you are!

It could work.

Sadly, if you threw a hissy-fit over something really nice, like the West African success against ebola, you wouldn’t get any coverage at all because the world doesn’t work that way.

Sadly, if you threw a hissy-fit over the nastygram items listed above, you might get branded as a tantrummy sort of bozo, because that is the way the world works. Seriously, who wants to read a book written by a bozo, unless you are the REAL Bozo, and then, hey, that might be kind of cool. A book on clowns by the master clown himself – you could make it really scary…

Step One in the Gorilla Marketing Plan is to avoid Hissy-Fit Marketing (HFM), because it only garners negative attention. I get enough of that at work.

Step Two is to make things big, which is sort of a parallel to HFM. Make things big – broadcast yourself. Spread yourself out. Do LOTS of stuff, and tie it all together. Yes, it takes a little effort, which is anti-gorilla, but it simply has to pay off.

You are publishing your book online, right? What’s the magic word there? Nope, not bozo. It’s online, bozo. Search engines and crawlers and robots troll the WWW every single second, making links between this and that, him and her, it and, well, it. The more connections you have, the bigger you are.

You don’t stop dancing with the 600 pound gorilla when you’re tired – you stop when he’s tired. Dolly Parton wears those outrageous wigs to make her short little self not so much. Say what you will about the other parts of her, at least the wigs make her look taller.

So, no on the hissy-fit, yes on the broadcasting yourself all over the WWW.

If that doesn’t work, well, then, ding-dang it! What THE HECK IS GOING ON HERE??? WHATSA MATTER WITH THE DING-DANG STINKING WORLD…

Gorilla Marketing

Marketing your work is kind of like having kids – there’s a fun ton of work to be done before the happy bundle of joy… sort of … well I guess it’s really just a lot of work. But, like raising kids, it can be totally nerve-wracking. You’ve got decisions to make, and, most often, no one off of whom to bounce them.

Guerrilla marketing is smart, slick, creative marketing that takes advantage of niches and opportunities that present themselves. It takes a quick and agile mind to spot the chances to promote your product, and a lot of time and focus to jump on them when they pop up.

Gorilla marketing, on the other hand, doesn’t take a lot of time, or energy, and probably doesn’t even work…it’s my own theory. It involves trundling your product out before a lackluster audience – rather like the folks that visited PT Barnum’s circus for the free beer – and hoping that they will somehow generate a degree of interest that will result in million dollar sales. It’s rather like armchair quarterbacking – you don’t do anything and expect amazing results. So far it’s worked for me, in that I’ve done very little and have no results. At all.

But there IS a way to make gorilla marketing work. There is a way to spread your net, ah, yes, the spreading of the net theory, that will open the magic door for you.

Just for the record, the magic door is the one that pops open with a publishing contract for this book plus the next 300 novels and a movie deal for each. Kinda like the Muppets “Standard Rich and Famous Contract”. You might want to practice your signature for that one.

In my effort to act just like a gorilla and market my book, I have enlisted the help of a master ground-roots marketer. And when I say enlisted, I mean pled on bent knee and have yet to receive an answer. Puleeeeze help with my book. Puleeeeeeeeeeeeze….

The plan is secret, but, like a secret you tell a gorilla, soon to be out.

Okay, I’ll spill: if I can get the master marketer on board, he will be the linchpin that makes the whole shebang fire off like fourth of July mint juleps.

The net continues to spread, not from just this blog, but with other avenues that I’ve yet to exploit – oh, it’s coming my friend.

How does it work for you? Developing a growing cadre of readers, albeit only vaguely interested, builds the background for your book. Publish yourself all over the place, and don’t forget to mention your book. Then, find yourself a marketing guru to turn the key, so to speak. They are out there.

If my marketing master turns out to be a guru, I’ll let you know ASAP. And, you probably won’t even have to buy my book, or act like a gorilla.

Tips from a Marketing Guru

Gosh, that’s a selling title. Sadly, I sort of have the opposite in mind, but you can’t make a headline that says “I Need Tips from a Marketing Guru”, because no non-marketing guru will read your blog. And, although my children believe me to be an ATM, I was sort of hoping to get some advice on the cheap.

Here’s my bass-ackwards marketing plan, which needs serious consideration. WARNING: don’t do as I do, for I don’t know what I’m doing.

In the new world of publishing, the reader chooses the author, not the other way around. One way to build steam for your book is to offer it for free, or at least parts of it, to get it out there in the big old WWW. You build interest, you build potential readership, you build search linkages, yada yada yada.

In the new world of publishing, you must be brave, little Piglet, and put yourself into the market. But you needn’t do it all at once – it might be better to have a little cache of readers behind you. That’s the theory I read somewhere.

In my case, I’m a chicken. In my brave new world, we put chapters out and sort of test the waters. You sort of tentatively do things in tiny fits and starts just in case you’ve done something majorly idiotic. Hey, it could happen.

So, when you have a minute or twenty, if you wouldn’t mind, would you be so kind as to visit my pages and read the first and seventeenth chapters of my recently completed novel? I promise you’ll be entertained. Promise. Pinky-swear.

I also promise to keep you apprised of new happenings in this wacky adventure.

Especially if I hear from a marketing guru!

Afraid of Being Scared

Even the bravest fellas fall victim to the heeby-jeebies, don’t they? Now matter how many mummies you’ve faced in closets, doncha think there’s one creepity creep that just plain scares the crackers out of you? I’m sure Cap’n Kirk must have had, like, ten minutes of total flip out when they told him he would have to fistfight the Gorn, didn’t he?

I mean, if said creepity being didn’t exist, wouldn’t you be sort of like Superman, or Evil Kneivel? You’d be, like, bring it on over breakfast, wouldn’t you? Gasoline and cigarettes for lunch? Whawhooof – dang, lookit that fireball! Doesn’t scare me.

It turns out that finishing the book, while difficult, was nothing compared to the next challenge, the real issue, the stay-awake all-nighter of all time. You’re a writer – you know. Having somebody read it. Duh-duh-DUH!!!

There must be ten million what-ifs running through my head…what if they don’t like it…what if I left a bajillion typos…what if they don’t get my hero…what if they put it down and tell me I’m STOOOPID?

The difference between a novelist and someone who says I’ve always wanted to write a book is that the novelist writes it. They face out the evil task and do the deed.

The difference between a novelist and a published author must be this next step of leaping across the yawning chasm of what-ifs and approaching the external reader challenge calmly and professionally. Thank you, sir, may I have another?

It’s not that I haven’t had other readers – one of my daughters actually liked it. The other hasn’t quite gotten around to finishing chapter two. My wife almost finished if, and my sister got well past the middle. Perhaps it’s too long…

So, it’s down to paying a stranger to read it. I’ll give you fifty bucks to read my book…wanna buy a watch?

Maybe they could give me some tips and pointers about the book…except that I am so beyond the tips and pointers phase. That phase was, like, two rewrites ago. This book is the bomb, the deal, the cat’s sleeping gear.
This one is better, brighter, more connected. This one is good.

Soooo, what would a reader do? Find my errors, I guess. Tell me they didn’t get it, I imagine. Probably tell me it’s too long, maybe.

I’m not afraid of the reader. I’m afraid of the rewrite if they don’t like it. Or, should I pull a Captain Kirk and boldly go to publishing?

Do you see? Can you feel the terror? Can you see how hard this part is? This is literally like seriously hard, like trying to land a B-52 on a football field at night during a hurricane hard. Passing a watermelon through your nostril…well, maybe not that hard. But hard!

So, Mr. Knievel, you may have the motorcycle and the cool jacket…wait a minute. That’s just costumery stuff to make us think that you’ re brave, but maybe you have the heebie-jeebies, too. Maybe some things make Superman do a little squirt in his shorts, too. THAT’S why he wears that cape!

There’s no antidote for the heebie-jeebies but to do what you’re supposed to do.

Be brave, little Piglet.

Oh, Owl, I’m afraid I’m scared!

Stick a Fork in Me

Done like a ton of finished, like a taco casserole in a thousand degree oven I am done, done as the day is long, done. Finito. Wrapped it up. Did the deal, finished across the line with a big ol’ smile across my face. DONE!

72,584 words of pathos, humor, and history all wrapped up in a nice little package featuring my friend Phineas, who gives up, gets angry, blows his top, cries, and finds his father, all the while fighting a running battle with the sea. Phin, my boy, carped at by the ship’s sailing master, driven to near distraction by the French king’s granddaughter, and called every harsh, rude, hurtful name in the book, tries to find his way, figure out how he got thrown into the seagoing gulag that is the Kathryn B.

Not a spoiler alert, not here – you’ll have to read for yourself how this one turns out.

In fact, my next step is to find a reader. Someone who can be honest with me, but someone who knows a thing or two or three about the Young Adult Fiction business, what they’re looking for, what will float, what will sink like a stinking stone.

Really, my next stop is on the publishing wagon. Get this monster read by someone with brains, rework it to their thoughts, and then Wordsmash it or Yahoo it or Amazon it or something.

Really, the next step, which starts tomorrow, is to think about marketing. Building the old platformaroony that will carry this book into the bazillion dollar sales range.

You, my friend, need not worry. I will not try to sell you a book. You are my only reader, and I thank you for sticking with me. Stay with me, sail with me over the horizon of the publishing adventure. I promise to tell you everything. The rewards could be great.

For now, the goal is to simply enjoy 72,584 words of doneness. Finitoness. Ah, sweet victory, thy name is Phineas.

The End of the World

It could all be whipped away from us in the very blink of an eye, this trusty old world of ours. I might not even be able to finish this post because the dumb old world ending thing might happen fir… st. If you’re a fan of Dr. Who, it almost happens every week.

On a totally different subject, my wife and I were talking about absolute cold… well, I was babbled about it and she was very nice… absolute cold. So cold that all of the heat is drawn out of the molecules, down to the quarks and their cousins falling to infinitesimally small particles of nothing, but not falling because there is no energy. No energy, no heat, but absolute cold. Maybe that’s the end of the world.

Or, maybe it happened today, when my daughter told me that maybe I should reconsider my book – you have a good idea, there, but maybe you should write it this way. Excuse me? Excuse me? Excuuuuuuuuse me? You’re my kid. You’re supposed to think it’s better than Gone with the Wind, for crying out loud. Maybe it would be better if…?

It’s not the end of the world, but, you’re a writer, you know how it feels.

This afternoon was supposed to be a nice editing session, powering through the last quarter of the book, reworking working sentences into elegant, beautiful descriptions of the human condition.

He pulled the trigger. The pistol exploded in fire and smoke. The pirate swore and ran for the ladder. Lah dee dah dee dah.

Maybe she’s right. Maybe I should sit down and write a book like J.K. Rowling, or Stephen King. Yes, perhaps I’ll try that. Maybe I’ll just write version seven of this stupid book off as a whim, one that’s lasted a good six years, and do something else. I hear that wallpaper’s easy to hang. Taco Bell’s hiring.

It’s not the end of the world. But some simple conversations can cool your heart until the quarks cease their tiny orbits.

Now, I’m not complaining. I am sharing this with you, dear writer, because the day may come when a loved one delivers to you the blow that ends your world, your entire universe.

But you know that you’re good – you just have to hold onto that, because you ARE good, dear writer. And tomorrow the sun will come up and the absolute zero in your heart will thaw, and your muons will start their crazy dance, and life will go on.

And you’ll think about what you’ve been told, and you’ll put it into the salad bar of your mind, right next to the windmills, and continue your work.

See? It wasn’t the end of the world.

Creepy Little Voices

You know the line of jokes: the little voices made me do it, I only do what the little voices tell me, how do I know you are not just another little voice, etc.

So, rattle me this, Bidman: you’re a writer, right? You write dialog, right? In that dialog, your characters say stuff that sometimes surprises even you, right? So, like, where do those words come from?

Is not the character you’ve created exactly like a little voice in your head? Consider:

Bob: You don’t even know my last name…

Julio: But I could, man! I’m telling you, we could be famous.

Bob: Julio, I don’t want the kind of fame you’re suggesting.

Julio: Aw, come on, Bob. At least think about it.

I just shot that little gem right there out of my head, unconsidered, unrehearsed, and un-edited. I know, I know, hold the applause.

So, like, where did it come from? The names popped up as I typed them, and the dialog followed along. In the first line I thought Bob might be talking to a girl, and I almost typed Julia, but I didn’t like Bob’s tone. So Julio is proposing something that will make them famous, but Bob doesn’t think it’s a good idea. Boy, how much story can you get out of just four lines?

In the rule book for regular folks, How to Be a Regular Person, by Ima Sandwich, it says that the little voices in your head are bad. They are destructive, and not real.

But, if you write down what the little voices say, you could be famous. And not for, like, blowing up dams and stuff, but good things, like writing fine, fine art.

Alas, my little voices aren’t good enough for fine art. They come as the simple regurgitation of all the hundreds of thousands of lines of dialog and conversation I’ve read and heard over the last half-century.

But isn’t that what writing really is? Don’t you mish-mosh ideas together and come up with characters for your novel? Doesn’t Cyrus say something that sounds like something you’ve heard before? Or Ethel? Rodney? Ralf? Aren’t they kind of barfing up old conversations in new, and sometimes surprising ways?

An actor memorizes his words, but the feelings behind them come from deep inside him. He applies his five or so decades of experience to the character he portrays, even though he’s never had to face the character’s exact circumstances.

Dollars to donuts says that you are doing the same thing with your mightier-than-the-sword word processor. Especially if you write horror, and your characters say the creepy stuff that the media tells is what the little voices say.

The answer is probably that, because you don’t act on the little voices, you’re not crackers.

But, tell me you haven’t awakened in the wee small hours with a perfect line in your head: Jackson says “well, it looks like rain to me.”

Thank you, little voices.

Alert: Monster in the Cupboard (not Closet)

If you write a lot, but don’t get feedback, yours, my friend, is a lonely game. You toil away, fitting together the pieces of your written puzzle like so much cheese at the mousetrap factory, when, one day, the monster grabs you.

I am a miserable novelist. I just realized it. Not misery like in hey lady, that was my ANKLE thank you very much, but in misery as in whoa, dude, do you, like, know any words? How many ways can you say “said” without sounding moronic, he intoned. Whimpered, whispered, hissed, murmured, muttered, uttered, grunted, yelled, roared, bellowed. Well, that’s it for me.

And that sentence structure, what’s up with that? He opened the door and looked inside as the tree fell through the neighbor’s roof. He drove the car and whistled a happy tune as the rain pattered joyfully through the open sunroof. He wrote the post and congratulated himself on at least writing something as he bored his reader (bless you, whoever you are) to tears. Subject verb the noun clause and verb a noun clause as noun verb preposition noun clause. Booooooooooooooring.

Maybe it’s because, as a technical writer, my is writing is limited to “attach the motor mount to the casting with (2) socket head cap screws.” It isn’t romance, but it pays the bills. While it’s easy to write “carefully place the hinged device against the casting and thread the screws, one-by-one, into the small holes”, my editor would hand it back to me faster than a greased bowling ball on Crisco Boulevard.

In truth, there’s something else going on.

You’re a writer – I ask you: who is your worst critic? Go ahead and think, we’ll wait… do you need to make a phone call?

Of course it’s YOU, you ninny!

Except not really you, but the monster in the cupboard. I was going to say monster in the closet, but that now leads to coming out of the closet, which has a whole different meaning than what I was shooting for, and oh, now everything’s all tangled up. One moment, please…

So, the monster in the cupboard is your own self-doubt, self-fear and self-loathing (if you’re in Las Vegas), trying to sell you a bill of goods. I know it’s just a bill of goods because my daughter told me today that she likes my book better than Hunger Games. She might be bucking for extra allowance, but I’ll take what I can get!

The monster lives in the cupboard of your mind, next to the windmills, and sees the absolute worst in everything that you do. And it loves, Loves, LOVES to point it out to you.

Part of the monster is good. I mean, it’s the only one who makes you go back and polish that sentence once more – you know it needed it. It’s the only one who makes you question whether this book really needs this scene.

But the monster is also baaaaad, baaaad, because it can convince you that you are a miserable writer. You know it isn’t true, but the monster seems so authentic, so… so… so right.

You know that you are the monster – your parents said you were a little one when you were a kid – which means you can stop being the monster.

The next time you flop into a heap in front of your word processor, crying because you just aren’t good enough to write this book, and you really should not have quit your day job, and how could you have EVER thought that you could do this…well, you can just stop it with the Mr. Nastypants routine.

Nobody’s buying it, and you’re just being a whiney crybaby because you listened to the monster in the cupboard.

Shut the cupboard and get back to work.