Resident Explainer
Here’s something you hadn’t thought about. Think about this: you’re a writer, you know how it goes. You live in words. A well chosen word is worth a thousand pictures.
If you’re like me (you have my pity) you find yourself working more and more on the tiny keyboard of your phone. It’s so easy to just jot down ideas.
However. Howevuh. How Ev Er.
Continue reading “A Penny at a Time”First, admissions: I’m sitting on a folding chair in a gym in Anaheim, CA, surrounded by at least a hundred screaming, volleyball-playing teenage girls. I have not had enough sleep, and I’m terrifically annoyed by the itty-bitty keyboard on this phone that keeps recommending words I don’t want to use.
Continue reading “Take Your Day”What’s the difference between a gorilla and a pound of oranges?
Once, in a galaxy far, far, etc., I had my first novel roll across an editor’s desk at Random House. The editor liked the book, but suggested a small gaggle of changes before they would sign it.
Continue reading “Forget the Setup, Eddie”Why I like the Flintstones movie – the first one, with John Goodman and Rick Moranis. There’s a writer’s tale in this, I promise…
Continue reading “Atta Boy, Fred”If it looks like a duck, and floats like a duck, but doesn’t smell like a duck, is it a duck? Or is it a decoy? A fake duck? Perhaps a wannabe duck.
You’re a writer – you know how it goes. You pour your heart and soul into your work, you polish every single word, and then you launch it out into the world. But… how?
Once I was in a restaurant and the waitress asked me what I wanted. I told her I’d been thinking about the turkey sandwich, to which she replied “and what did you decide?”
I used to think that the difference between writers and folks who thought they’d like to take a stab at writing is that writers write. I still believe that to be true, but perhaps not as thoroughly true as I once thought.
Suppose you wrote your brains out, but shoved all your work into the furnace and sent it up in flames? If no one reads it, did it have meaning?
Obviously it did to you, but only to you. You’re a writer – you have a story to tell. If you don’t tell it, or if you tell it only to yourself, well, are you a writer?
It’s a long way to get to the point that we must publish. My books are at Smashwords – yes, that was a shameless plug, but it illustrates a point.
Once upon a time we would hawk our words to agents who would hawk our words to publishers who would bring our words to the world at large. In Shakespeare’s time, Will had to hawk his words to his publisher – there was no agent – and together they hawked his words to the world.
I’m thinking that Mr. Shakespeare’s paradigm has returned, now that the writer’s world has turned into a Wild West of Self Publishing.
I found this great website, run by Joanna Penn, called the Creative Penn. Her site is full of good ideas and great tools and is generally a lot of fun to wander about. While I don’t know Ms. Penn, and only recently discovered her site, I believe there is a lesson there for us all.
You, my writer friend, and I, unless we are to be mistaken for decoys, or wannabe ducks, must actively, and intensely, pursue the task of hawking our words to the world. It’s up to you and me.
Unless we do that, I believe that we are deceiving ourselves into thinking that we are somehow successful authors for having published ourselves. While that is truth, it an incomplete and rather shallow truth.
You, my friend, and I, must embrace the fact that if we do not actively market our work, we do not, in fact, smell like a duck.
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#writersofinstagram #bookworm #bookstagram #writing #booklover
Wow, sustainability is a buzzy word, isn’t it? Was this taco sustainably produced? What about that triple-spice latte? It’s an overused word in these times of growing awareness, but it applies here.
If you’ve followed along in my sustainably-produced diatribe, you know that Year One was the Year of No Regrets, Year Two was the Year of Confidence, and Year Three was the Year of Accomplishment. All these years are aimed at helping you, the hidden artist, bring your talent to the fore, that you might live your life as the creative individual you truly are.
So, here we are at Year Four, the year with the trendy name. What does it mean? How can talent be sustainable. It’s not like coffee, after all.
This whole five-year program is about building and counting artistic success. You stopped denying that you were talented, you adopted that talent, and then you went out and proved to the world that you are an accomplished talent. I am so proud of you.
The Year of Sustainability is all about doing it again. And again. And again. This is the year in which you make your artistic existence real. It’s a subtle, but very important difference from the Year of Accomplishment.
In that year, you did the big thing – in my case, I leapt away from the world of never-ending, soul-stealing customer service jobs and became a technical writer. A writer, a real writer! Look! It’s on my business card!
The Year of Sustainability is the year in which you prove that your success wasn’t a one-off wonder, a Looking Glass/Brandy hit. This is the year in which you build the structure to keep repeating that success.
In my Year of Sustainability, I proved to the world that I really was a writer by getting myself hired as a technical writer. But then I had to prove it to myself and the company that I was worthy of the title. I did it by staying really focused, being willing to learn, and always open to growing in the job.
That’s your job this year. You must embrace your accomplishment, and make it repeatable, reliable.
Where we go from here is The Year of Independence, in which you let go of the previous you and launch into the abyss of success. Whoa, there’s an image, huh?
Now, the Year of Sustainability, like the Year of Accomplishment, may take more than one year. While it may have taken you a while to reach your accomplishment, it may equally take a touch more than a year to make your success sustainable.
But, the whole point of this exercise is to get it into your head that you are a successful, talented person. You can be the creative individual that you’ve always thought you were. You can do it.
So, get your head around that fact that you have made a huge accomplishment, but it was just the first of many. This is the year in which you prove, to yourself and the universe, that you are a successful, talented individual. Your art is your life.
Okay, true story: my road from empty customer service rep to fulfilled writer has a caveat that we may as well look at.
I’ll admit it: technical writing is not a glamorous job. It does not fulfill my need to tell the stories in my head. It doesn’t sell my novels, and doesn’t bring me fame and fortune.
What this job does, and the reason I count it such a big success, is that it establishes me, my name, my talent, as those of a writer. Yes, it’s technical writer. But the second word in that title means everything.
In this job, I’m surrounded by writers, most of whom are journalists. I speak the language of writers. My work, albeit assembly instructions, is read all over the world every day. These are not the stories that I want to tell, but they are stories that I am paid to tell, and they make my house payment and send my kids to college. That to me is a success.
When I look in a mirror, I don’t see a customer service rep. I look at a writer.
When you look in a mirror, this year I want you to see a writer, or a dancer, a singer, a painter, an actor… I want you to see the you that you know you are. Even if, like me, it’s just a version of who you want to be.
I’m very proud of you. Keep going!
I have proof! It’s true! They are way smarter than I am!
See, I’d seen an ad during the Super Bowl, like, four times, for the McDonald’s Cheesy Bacon Fries, and each time I thought to myself “dang, that’s cool!”
Now, my darling, wonderful wife is out of town, and I find myself with a day off (please don’t tell my wife I did this – she’ll have the I-told-you-so of a lifetime, and I’ve already given her so, so many. It’s safe to post this, because she never reads my stuff. If you don’t tell her, we’re cool).
So, It’s a lovely day at the harbor here in Ventura, and there’s a McDonald’s just a few blocks away. I don’t feel all that hot from an abusive weekend in Las Vegas (being volleyball parents isn’t quite what it’s cracked up to be), and, hey, I mean, it’s McDonald’s, right?
The first challenge is that the Cheesy Bacon Fries come in a box with a knife and spork. Uh oh, the gullet says. This could be danger. Then I crack open the box.
So, when we were in Montreal, we discovered a Canadian dish called poutine – fries, cheese curds, brown gravy, and meat, all piled onto a plate. It is heaven on a cold day.
Ronald’s version doesn’t have the brown gravy, but it’s the same thing.
The first taste is really great – man, warm salt and fat. Kind of bacony, a little bit potatoey, and a strong dose of cheesy. Even as I chew it, I’m thinking this is not a very good idea. Kinda of like eating the cake that’s been out on the counter for a couple of days. It might be okay. Might.
So, about the crow. He flies up and takes station on the lamppost, right above my car. He looks at me with that look that crows have – inscrutable, but intriguing. He wants a fry. He’s scared away all the pigeons, and the seagulls haven’t spotted the McD bag yet.
I make sure he sees me waggle a bacon-encrusted cheesy fry out the window, and give it a toss onto the grass. He dives on it the second it’s down.
Now, seagulls are smart. Once, my daughter and I played fetch with one. We had found a golf ball on the beach, and tossed it into the sand down next to the waves. A gull swept down, scooped it up, and dropped in right in front of us. I threw the ball again, and the bird brought it right back. We played like this for maybe 15 throws, until he dropped the ball way out in the water and flew away. Huh. Game over.
But seagulls will eat just about anything. You can make them explode with Alka Seltzer tablets – but please, please don’t. I can’t think of a more awful way to die.
This crow however, perhaps ponders a more awful demise in eating the cheesy bacon fry. He holds it in his beak and stares at me with disdain, his black eye asking “how could you?” He hops onto the back of a bench, the fry firmly held in his beak, and looks thoughtfully out to sea.
The arrival of a flock of seagulls startles him, and he bolts out over the harbor in a stunning show of aerial mastery. He swings over me, the cheesy bacon fry wagging in his mouth, and then out over the water.
With every sign of intention and purpose, he drops the cheesy bacon fry into the bubbling waves, and off he goes.
What does this story have to do with writing books? Everything, my friend, everything and more.
If you , like me, publish your own work (my books are at Smashwords) there’s a huuuuuuuuge lesson here:
I bought the McDonald’s Cheesy Bacon Fries, knowing full well that it was just a box of salt, fat, and a strange orange semi-liquid cheese. No, I couldn’t eat them, because, well, ick. But I gave McD’s my money for the experience. It was all sizzle, and surely no steak.
It’s the sizzle. It has to be the sizzle – sizzle so alluring that it makes you buy a product you really know you shouldn’t have, just because, well, because there’s so much sizzle!
On the health side, I’ll fly with the crows.
But on the marketing side, I’ll take a page from McDonald’s!
Please don’t tell my wife.
Hashtags of sizzle:
#McDonald’s #authorsoninstagram #droppington place #marigolds end
Welcome to year three of the Five Years to Independence program. Or system, or scheme, or deal… what it’s called isn’t as important as what it is. What’s in a name?
Name notwithstanding, this is not a self-help program, or a get rich quick scheme. This is just a different way to view the road you’ve traveled, and to adjust your thinking to find success in the way ahead.
Here’s something I hadn’t considered but is true: although this program is meant to help you if you know you’re talented, have spent your life hiding from it, but now realize you must become who you are, this scheme actually works if you’re living on your talents, but want to move up to a higher plateau. I know this because I developed this thing to turn my own life around, and am now using it again to further my products (the novels Droppington Place and Marigold’s End). You marketers: did you see this shameless plug? Shameless.
Year one, as we recall, was the Year of No Regrets, in which you stopped whacking yourself upside the head for not having explored your talents when you were younger. You changed the way you looked at the past, recognizing that the road you took led you to this new road.
Year two was the Year of Confidence, in which you viewed yourself as the creative talent you know yourself to be. If you dance, in this year you become a dancer, or a writer, or a painter, or a videographer. The Year of Confidence is the year in which you stop hiding behind the ordinary to finally be the extraordinary person that you are.
The secret behind these two years of mind-changing is that you were also practicing your art: working on your talent, albeit behind closed doors. You did this so that, when you announce to the cosmos that you ARE a singer, you’ve been singing for at least as year. That’s the keystone to this whole project: stop hiding from your talent, stop regretting that you’ve waited so long, and USE IT!
If we do a bit of math… let’s see, carry the one… that brings us to Year Three: The Year of Accomplishment.
Here is where the chicken hits the road. In this year, we move our art from inside ourselves out into the world. Yes, into the world.
Years ago I worked for a major international bank, helping people find solutions to their mortgage problems. The management catchphrase in use there was “if you didn’t document it, it never happened.” Essentially, if no one saw the transaction, it never took place.
In my revision of myself, I realized that a writer who thinks about writing but doesn’t do it is not a writer – he’s a thinker. A writer writes.
But that’s not quite right, is it? If I wrote beautiful poems every day, but kept them hidden in a closet, or burned them, is that writing? A writer’s work needs to be read, just as a painting needs to be seen and a song needs to be heard. A song sung to one’s self may be beautiful, but does not further one’s career.
So, this year, we stop singing to ourselves, and we put our talent out there. Out there on the world stage, come what may.
The glory of this age in which we live is that you now, finally, have a world stage at your fingertips. Now you can do your stand-up before a world audience – every nation in the world can see you dance, hear your song, read your words.
That’s an accomplishment, to get your work out there into the world. I’ve advocated doing that throughout the previous two years, if you’re brave enough. If you haven’t been brave enough to do it before, then this is the year you overcome that fear and let ‘er rip.
So, here’s how I faced my fear of the World Stage: It’s a busy place, with a hundred million voices all clamoring for their moment in the sun. Being one in a hundred million is a pretty safe, anonymous place to be. (For example, my books (see the shameless plug, above) are out there, waiting to be read. and have only sold 17 copies so far). That’s a nice comfort. On the other hand, I’ve sold 17 books so far, which means that a shaft of sunlight DID shine on my work, at least 17 times.
So, that’s your job this year. Put yourself out there, either in the safe and comfortable way of YouTube or Instagram, or, as I did, pushing my online published work to literary agents (can you spell “rejection letter?”).
Do it. Don’t hide from it. If no one sees your dance, how can you become known to the world as a dancer? Don’t forget, that’s the point of this whole exercise.
You’re a talented individual who has hidden from that talent all your life. You can keep hiding, or you can become who you really are.
“Be brave, little Piglet.” Owl’s stentorian tone emboldens little Piglet to hold on and endure the flood of the Hundred Acre Wood, according to A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh.
You and I, we must be brave. What is talent, except the bravery to do the unusual, isn’t it? The talented have a vision, a world view, that needs to be shared.
You’re talented. Let’s get out there and share it!
This is really long-winded, I realize, but it’s important.
Ideally, by the end of the Year of Accomplishment, you’ve exhibited your talent in a place that will get you noticed. Ideally, that shaft of sunlight will illuminate your work, and you’re on your way.
The first time I ran this program, my Year of Accomplishment took two years, at the end of which I made the leap from under-employed customer service rep/novelist to technical writer/novelist. I became a writer.
I’m in another round of the program, with the goal of accomplishing the title change from technical writer/novelist to novelist/technical writer. I’m in year two of that accomplishment. The accomplishment will be to get seriously published: that’s a big one.
Like the speed limit on the freeway, the five-year structure of this program is just a suggestion: it may take you seven years, or six months.
Thanks for staying with me. Two more years to go!
Oh, and, visit my Smashwords page, or my online home.
You’re a writer – you know how it is. We’re all trying to grab that brass ring of fame, unless it’s golden. No, it’s brass, isn’t it? I’ve forgotten. It has something to do with a carousel…
So, here’s a cool way to douse yourself in immortality – become the Lord of a Castle! I’ve done it, and, my friend, I feel positively, well, Lordly.
It’s a crazy road – one of my very most favorite novels is The Three Musketeers. As you know, the protagonist of the story is a fellow named D’artagnan.
Well, lo and behold, there’s a French company called D’artagnan that specializes in raising funds to rescue French castles and chateaus (I suppose that’s really chateaux, right?) that are fading away into history. They sell shares of the castle. You buy a share, you become part owner of it.
For fifty euros, I bought a share of a castle called Ebaupinay – that’s her, there, in the picture. Yeah, she’s a little rough – bit of a fixer-upper – but that’s the whole idea.
It’s very cool. They’re rebuilding her with the same tools that were used when she was first built, in the 14th Century. Same tools, same materials. It could take a while, as I doubt there are any serfs that will trade labor for food and not getting, what’s the word? Killed.
Once the castle is done, actually, while they’re doing the work, they’ll recreate the village that nestled inside the walls – again, everything will be as it was seven hundred years ago.
What’s really cool is that I’ll get a commemorative coin, struck right there at the castle, that shows that I’m a Chatelain de le Chateau. That’s right. Of course, the blacksmith, who has yet to arrive, will strike the coin in the smithy’s shop, which has yet to be built. But, hey, I’m patient.
In the meantime, I have complete access to the castle, as a 1/10,000th of a Lord (I think they sold that many shares).
Ah, the lordly life. Now that I am the Lord of a Castle, it strikes me as astounding how similar this new life is the one I had before I joined. Hmph.
To join, visit Dartagnans.fr. It’s pretty cool. Tres chic.
So, here’s a shameless plug: the lead character in my novel Droppington Place has his origins in Shakespeare’s time, perhaps 150 years after this castle was built, and in England, not in western France. But, believe me, there’s a tie-in somewhere. Hmph.
Visit Droppington Place and see if you can find a link. If you do, uh, let me know, would ya? I’m feeling a little lost…
#droppingtonplace #shakespeare #authorsofinstagram
If you’re just tuning in, this series of posts is about a self-improvement (ick, I hate that term) a self-developmental program that I’ve put myself through twice (yes, twice) which I call Five Years to Independence. If you follow the steps, yes it takes a long time, and no, no harm will come to you, and, in the end, you’ll feel better about your talents, and will find yourself accomplished in your field.
This plan works for you if you are not currently using your chosen talent to support yourself. If, for example, you are a fine painter, but you spend your days checking tax returns for a living, this plan is for you. I myself spent half of my life trapped in a succession of customer service positions before I figured this out.
Year One was all about not looking back, about honoring the road you’ve chosen so far in life. Although it hasn’t led you to success in using your talents, it has led you here.
And here is where we begin Year Two – The Year of Confidence.
Although this year is about self-confidence, it’s not the point. The point is that this year you express, believe, and totally embrace confidence in your talent. Whatever it is.
If you dance, this year you are a dancer. If you write, this year you are a writer. If you act… and so on and so forth.
This is the year in which you give yourself permission to be who you really are. You stop making excuses as to why you’re not that person: you be that person.
It takes a lot of courage to stop thinking of your talent as “well, you know, I dabble in watercolor,” and to instead refer to yourself as a painter. But that’s what this year is all about: courage.
One of the key parts of last year, the Year of No Regrets, was that, while you stopped kicking yourself for never having trusted your talent, you also worked in your art. You wrote, danced, sang, built a resume, even if only you saw it, which says Yes, I Am That Artist.
So, in fact, you are that artist. You write/dance/sing/act/paint. Whether anyone has seen it or not is immaterial. There is now artwork in the world, which you created. Artwork, by its very definition, is created by an artist. And that’s you.
Now, if you skipped the working part of the first year, it’s okay. Start working now. Now. Don’t put it off, or you’re wasting your time.
So, yes, that is who you are, but it does take some courage to admit it. You don’t have to go get new business cards. You need to tell your heart of hearts every single moment of every single day that you are a practicing artist. If you doubt yourself, look at the work you’ve accomplished.
If you are a performance artist, your road is both more difficult and more rewarding. A painter’s painting is a forever thing, but that moment when you catch the audience’s heart – that is fleeting. If you’ve ever done it, you feel it in your soul. For you to practice your art, you need to put yourself in front of an audience so you can pursue and perfect those moments. It’s harder, because you need to be cast in role – I recommend acting classes, either in workshops or for college credit, or both. Community Theater is always a very useful option. But it is so rewarding, because those little moments are such emotional highs. I know, spoken like a true actor. Funnily enough, I chose writing instead.
So, do you now what to do here in Year Two? Be it. Live it. Stop dreaming of it and become it.
So, here is my caveat about the Five Years to Independence: you have to define success. You don’t quite see my name on billboards, or find my novels at Barnes and Noble (yet).
Here’s how the plan has worked for me: I spent literally twenty-eight years in the customer service industry. Starting as a simple rep, I worked my way up through the ranks until I was a corporate director. When that company was sold, I moved on to become a partner in a service business, where my primary function was customer service. All the while, I dabbled in acting, in voice-over, in writing. The Great Recession crashed my business, and I found myself working part time at Bank of America helping people negotiate their failed mortgages.
It was then that I started this program, having built it as I went, and figured out who I really was, and what I wanted to be. I wrote my brains out in the Year of No Regrets, and sold my work for pennies to a number of online publishing sites. In that year, I became a writer.
In the next year, I decided to focus on a practical use for my writing, and learned how to be a technical writer. In the summer of that year, I got myself hired as a full time technical writer.
That, to me, is a huge success. I make my living, pay my bills, support my family, through my art as a writer. I no longer say that I dabble in writing – I do it every single day. It’s not prose or poetry, but it’s my art. And I love it.
To be sure, there’s much more to come – I have two novels, Droppington Place and Marigold’s End, that I’m marketing right now (for you marketers out there, did you notice how I slyly built two links right into this post? I know, I know, brilliance at it’s best).
The caveat, then, is that you must define your success. Getting to where you want to be requires mapping a road. Now that you are confident as an artist, you need to start thinking about where you can ply your trade.
That comes next, in the Year of Accomplishment!
One thing about new years is that they bring new opportunities – it’s a line in the sand, a place to denote the difference between then and now, what you were and what you will be.
If, this year, you are looking to free yourself from the same, non-productive you that you’ve always been, the FYP (Five Year Plan) could be just the ticket, the cat’s pajamas, the bee’s knees, and so on.
Now, right out of the box, I have to tell you, I HATE self-help books, plans, and all things associated with them. HATE ‘EM! So, this is not a self-help plan. I’m just explaining what worked for me. There. I said it.
The FYP will help you if this is you: You’re talented (you know you are, people have told you, etc.), but you are afraid to trust that talent. What if you find out you’re not all that talented? What if you’re a fake? And so you live your life on the day to day, working a job because you have to, but all the while that urge to be something greater than you are bubbles away inside because, dang it, you know you are talented.
That was me. Luckily, financial circumstance eventually forced me to the point at which I had to face the talent monster and either fish or cut bait. That’s when I figured out the steps, painfully, and fitfully, to the FYP. I ran it the first time out of desperation, making it up as I went, and it worked. Now I’m running it again to achieve my goals.
This is Year One: The Year of No Regrets
You know you’re talented because you had a gazillion and one opportunities to prove it. You shined that time you played the drunk in the community play. They loved that portrait you painted. They all laughed at that skit you wrote, or gasped at your song. But that was way back then. And yet, and yet, you still dabble in the arts – you think about it. If only…
In my case, it was in high school. I was such a hit in the drama department, was mister funny pants and mister showbiz. I was gonna be somebody, except… except I dropped that golden thread of confidence when I made the transition from a big fish in a small pond to a minnow in an infinite sea. I let the thread go.
The Year of No Regrets draws a clean, bold line between yesterday and tomorrow.
The first step in the FYP is to let go of what you could have been. Kick it out the door. You ain’t that now, amigo. You coulda, woulda, shoulda, but you didn’t, and that’s an irrefutable fact.
But you know you are talented. You still painted that fine portrait, sang that fine song, acted that fine soliloquy, wrote that fine skit. The talent hasn’t changed. Maybe it’s little rusty, but it’s still there.
Creep up into the attic of your mind and dust off that treasured talent. It IS still there! You can still paint, sing, write, act, kick-box, whatever talent has always called you.
Life is all about the road you choose. You could have chosen the rich and famous artist road, but you didn’t. Something kept you from taking it.
For me, and for you I suspect, it was fear. Fear of failing. Fear of finding out that I wasn’t talented. Fear of being judged by my peers, or, worse, by people that don’t even know me. What if they thought I was a dud?
In the Year of No Regret, you admit that you didn’t take that road. Admit it: I didn’t pursue my dreams when I was younger. No judgment there, just a statement of fact.
Now that you’ve said it, you can let it go. Let the Four Winds carry it where they will, for it is yours no more.
Don’t speculate on where that road could have led. The only road that counts is the one you choose today.
Choose a new road today. Decide that today’s road, and tomorrow’s, and the ones that follow, are roads of confidence.
Respect the fact that you made good choices along the road you’ve followed. You are a reasonable, respectable person. There’s nothing wrong with the road you’ve followed so far.
Best of all, that road led you here, to this juncture.
The Year of No Regrets means that you don’t look back with sadness for where you haven’t been, but with joy, because it’s made you the strong, capable person who is ready, now, to face your talent.
It’s all easy to say, but it is sooooo hard to do. That’s why this plan is a five-year: each step takes a full year to become a habit so that you can succeed.
Each time you hear “I shoulda…” in your head, turn it around to “I’m gonna…”
Each time you think “If only I’d…”, remember that you’re going to, soon.
Every time you replace a regretful thought with a positive action statement, you become stronger.
Oh, and don’t think the FYP is some passive thing, amigo. There’s one more thing you need to do this year:
Get to work! Sing, or dance, or paint, or write, or do whatever it is that you do. No one has to see it or hear it, but you have to explore it.
Each time you practice your art – YES, YOUR ART – you gain confidence.
On one hand you’re getting stronger, and on the other you’re getting more confident. And you have 365 days to do it! Win-win-win, in my book.
Hey – maybe I’ll write a book!
I have no idea what that title means – what exactly is a “heave-ho?” Is that, like, a prostitute that throws up? That might be a “heaving ho.”
What I was trying to say is that a new year is a chance to do something new. Do you think that’s true? Out with the old year, in with the new? A chance to clean-slate your life?
Whoa, a clean slated life? Ditch everything that came before? The past? Just skip it. It’s a new year! A New Opportunity!
What a buncha hooey, right? Isn’t last year like, you know, last week?
No, no my authorial friend, it’s all right here, right now. Beyond getting a new calendar and changing your computer settings, a new year is a chance to change your mindset to success.
Yes – you. Success. All you have to do is focus on success, try your hardest to achieve it, and who knows what can happen. If you shoot for the stars, you just might make it to the moon. You might also crash in flames, but we don’t talk about that.
Gee, Mr. Reinhart, what in God’s name are you talking about?
I’ve been working on a five-year plan, but I’ve run off the rails. Here’s how it works:
Year One: The Year of No Regrets. Leave whatever happened in the past in the past, and don’t look back. Accept that now is now and make it the best now it can be.
Year Two: The Year of Confidence. Now what the past is in the past, be confident and move boldly into the world, doing what it is that you do best.
Year Three: The Year of Accomplishment. This is the year you use your skills, talents, and confidence to accomplish great things.
Year Four: The Year of Sustainability. Now that you’ve made this great accomplishment, this year you build the structure that makes your success repeatable and reliable.
Year Five: The Year of Independence. This is the year you use the structure you built last year to move out of the traditional working environment and roll on your own.
So, right now I’m in Year Four, sustainability. The problem is that, while I made a huuuge stack of accomplishments last year, none of them was of the type that I can build upon to build a sustainable income outside of the traditional working world. Rats.
So, this has to be Year Three-A, The Second Year of Accomplishment. This year is the year to achieve that amazing thing, that huuuuge accomplishment that establishes myself as a creative guru, an unmistakable with oodles of cash pouring through the transom. That’s gauche, I know, but, really, wouldn’t that be the coolest? Tell me, in your heart of hearts, couldn’t you go with a future like that?
So, back around the long circle to the beginning – this is the year. This is it. Take a look. Go hang out at your local bookstore and watch for my novels to appear. I might even do a book-signing or two.
This year. Watch.
Better: this year. You do it, too!
You remember that dorky sci-fi movie from the ’50’s “When Worlds Collide,” right? If you don’t, count yourself lucky. Earth was gonna get smashed by an asteroid, see, and so the scientists build these giant spaceships to fly away into space, see, and, well, you get the drift.
You’re a writer – you know how it is. You’ve got your work out there, doing its reader-generating thing, and you’re looking at your pile of ideas, wondering what’s going to call you next.
Same thing here.
Except, well, the ideas and facts work in funny ways, don’t they? Check this out.
My next book, please don’t tell anybody, is all about Blackbeard the pirate. Very in-depth, but fun, too, because, well, hey, it’s what I do. I’m still knuckle-deep in research, but I ran over a really cool, really helpful set of truths.
Was you a pirate in the early 1700’s, you were a rough-and-tumble sort of chap. Climbing rigging, whacking people with cutlasses, yelling “arrrgh”, that wasn’t for oldsters.
So, Captain Charles Johnson, in his book A General History of Pirates, which he penned in 1724, may have made a goof when he wrote that Blackbeard was born in 1680. Kevin Duffus, in his recent book The Last Days of Blackbeard, reasoned that such a birth year would have made the pirate 38 years old at the height of his career – quite old for an active in those days.
More likely, Duffus writes, that he was born in 1690.
Record skidding noise…
Wait. My character Phineas Caswell, from my novel Marigold’s End, was born in 1694. Er-ma-gersh, I can see the next novel to follow this Blackbeard piece: how cool would it be to get Phineas aboard young Blackbeard’s ship, before he turned pirate? Phineas is twelve, Blackbeard is 16, both are fresh to the sea… this will be great!
So, chasing one idea leads to another. One novel collides with another… when worlds collide!
Nah. It doesn’t work for me, either.
Remember when you were a kid, and you had to do chin-ups at school? OMG, that was the worst thing ever! I always cheated and took a little jump up, so I always got a count of at least one. That second one was murder. And the third? Forget it. Same with push-ups. To this day, when I think of push-ups, I see the unmoving gym floor swim before my eyes…
And so it is with marketing your own novel, as I am marketing mine. Which novel(s) do we speak of? Why, Droppington Place and Marigold’s End, of course. You’re a writer. You know how it goes.
Marketing is all about getting people to pay attention to you. You could make YouTube videos – tried that. You could make your own website – mine is right here: PhineasCaswell.com. You could make podcasts or something.
Whatever you do, you have to somehow drive traffic to it. That’s the key, the thing, the line over which you must cross to become the next Stephen King or J.K. Rowling.
So, I’ve been posting oodles of posts about the famous pirate Blackbeard on my site (see the shameless marketing plug above). In particular, I’ve focused on his most notorious ship, Queen Anne’s Revenge. Beyond that cool name, there’s just not much information available about her, which I take as a personal challenge. Why?
Okay, sit down – you’re not gonna believe this. My next novel deeply involves Blackbeard. Whoa! Huh? Did not see that coming, right? Blackbeard was born in 1680. My character Phineas Caswell, hero of Marigold’s End, a Phineas Caswell Adventure, was born in 1694. Both were sailing around the Caribbean at the same time, 1706… See? Those gears are a’turnin’,right? Blackbeard was 26 – in command of privateers or something, right? And Phineas… well, I leave it to your imagination to link those guys together. Or, actually, to MY imagination…
Anyway, I just ran a Google search on the phrase Queen Anne’s Revenge. My website didn’t show up on the first page, or the third, or the seventh. I gave up on Page 15, certain that I’m just not out there in the world. In fact, my site would appear, if I could find it, after “great snacks for the kiddos” and “cool dog names.”
Sigh.
Just like in middle school, in gym class, it’s all a question of keeping one’s chin up. Someday. Someday I’ll cross some magical line and come up on the first page of a Google search. And then the angels will sing, and the heavens will open up, and somebody will click through, visit my site, and buy my books.
Or, I could win the Powerball. The odds seem to be about the same.
You’re a writer, you know how it is. You write your book. You push it to agents. Nobody wants to represent it because, well, maybe it’s not that good of a book. Maybe it IS good, but not marketable. That’s what Disney told me.
I had an agent tell me “you should publish this yourself.”
Did so. Well, published this book instead: Droppington Place. But then I sat down and rewrote the book in question, which I have yet to push out to the agently world. That book is this book: Marigold’s End.
Boom – did you see how I did that, there? You notice that here, in the top quarter of my post, I’ve already pitched two products. Boom. Huh? You, my friend, have already been marketed to. Zimzam, what was that? What did it take?
That’s Gorilla Marketing at its best.
Okay, so, contrary to the Gorilla Marketing tenet of “do no work,” I did a little bit of work, and now have something to show you: PhineasCaswell.com.
“Wha… what’s happening?” you exclaim, your mind a whirl of sudden marketing impact. Boom, two books, zimzam, a website, just like that. Whoa. Sit down, my friend, lest you explode or something.
All right, all seriousness aside, if you have a minute, click on the PhineasCaswell.com link – there it is again. Open it in a new window so that you don’t miss any of my glorious words here.
Why is this a big deal? Because, if you publish your own book, you are responsible for marketing it. You need a website to give yourself some bottom – make yourself available for your readers. And, unless you yourself are a web designer, this can be a challenge.
I gave up trying to be a web designer as well as a marketer, an author, a technical writer/illustrator, a videographer, all in addition to being a loving husband and father.
First was Open Element, which gives you free, open-source web design software, with templates that seem to be “responsive” – you know, works well on cell phones as well as desktops. But the software is so so so so so very hard to navigate, and the stuff it seems like you really need? Well, that’s in French, you see…
Next came, Serif, a British company that makes a terrific web design suite. It’s quite inexpensive, but not yet quite up to the challenge of responsive web design.
Then came Google Web Design, which worked for a minute, but I couldn’t figure out the language to navigate their templates… OMG, my website looked ghastly! Like a commercial for Google!
However, GoDaddy, who carries my hosting, has a nifty WordPress plug-in. As above, boom, zimzam, etc, now PhineasCaswell.com is a nice, responsive website, looking equally cool on desktops, tablets and phones (marketers take note: that was yet another link).
Brag about the site though I should, I’m passing on to you, my valued reader, that WordPress seems to be really good at making a responsive website. That means that you don’t have to be.
One little nasty surprise does seem to come with a WordPress plug-in: the SSL certificate. If you haven’t got one of these, your WordPress site actually scares viewers away with a big warning that your site is not safe. I paid $75 to get my certificate. If you don’t pay the $75, you appear to the world as a creepy underworld scum, out to steal passwords. Seems as if there’s a piratical side to fighting pirates that just might be worse…
But you, my marketing self-publishing writer friend, that’s the big news for you, should you be looking for an easy way to build a backend for your authorial effort.
To those who were paying attention, I dropped Phineas Caswell as my nom de plume, and have published both novels under my own name. Not such a big deal for you, but a whopper for me!
You’re a writer, you know how it goes. You settle on a project, or maybe two, and you burn the midnight candle until it’s just a smoldering stub, and you tell everybody what your project is and how it’s your end-all-be-all raison d’etre and stuff…
But it isn’t. You fight the words and wrangle them into place. You beat yourself silly trying to find that structure, that style that sets you apart.You work until your mind bleeds to find the description that’s never been made.
But it doesn’t come.
It’s all the same hack.
I know. I’ve been hacking at the same project for, like, ever…
What to do, oh what to do.
Here’s something terrible that I shouldn’t tell you, but maybe you’ll see it.
I invented a producer, my writing boss. I gave her, (she’s a she) the complete and total task of managing my writing.
With Sydney (her name’s Sydney) in charge, I can mentally offload the task of managing my production to her. It sounds crazy, and I’m certain that is, but it has made my writing much easier.
Sydney’s a breeze to work for, because she doesn’t really exist, which means she hardly ever yells at me!
Yes, it’s nice to have a boss in the writing biz, even though, and I know you’ll agree, it’s crazier than a bag of wieners.
Now I just have to figure out to hit her up for a raise!
You run marathons for the joy of running, right? Surely it can’t be for the prize money. But you don’t devote your life to it, either. What do I do? Oh, I’m a marathon runner – oh, and I also work as a nuclear scientist, you know, during the week.
But, you’re a writer. You know how it goes. Writing is like breathing – like running. When it flows it’s golden, and when it doesn’t, you worry about getting it flowing. Writing is… everything.
But, everything else is everything, too. Somehow, some way, we all find a way to weasel in a little time to write – as I’m writing this, my daughter’s getting a cavity filled.
But, where running is glorious simply for the sake of running, writing doesn’t achieve its true glory until it’s been read. Until you transform someone’s thinking with your ideas, writing is just a mental exercise.
You know the difference between writers and wannabe writers, right? One does, while the other wishes he did. Writing tons of stuff and packing it away, never to be read, doesn’t do it, either. If no one reads your stuff, you’re not writing, just expressing.
So, what can the prize be? I am truly blessed to work as a professional videographer, writing and telling industrial stories. I am married to a terrific woman, have three successful, wonderful children, and live in a great house in a beach town. Hello?
For all that, my writer’s eye is still attracted to that shining bauble of intellectual immortality, that celestial club that includes Shakespeare and Hemingway, Milton, and, yes, Rowling. That club that persists far beyond the wash of generations.
Isn’t that why you write? Aren’t your ideas larger than your life? Don’t your characters extend beyond you?
If you impress somebody – change their mind, make them laugh, bring them an image they’d never seen – is that it? Are you done?
Or are you like a machine, an authorial savant, cranking and cranking out scenes and images, ad infinitum?
Is there a prize – a golden carrot of immortality? Does it show up one day in the mail? And, if you got it, could you stop writing?
These are the things that keep me up at night… well, that and seeking the flow… and making sure the mortgage is paid and the plumbing doesn’t leak and getting the dog’s teeth fixed and paying the taxes and that odd ticking when I turn the car and my son’s upcoming wedding and finding a good school for my daughter…
You’re a writer. You know how it goes.
Dateline, downton Phoenix, AZ:
Just saw a lady walking down the street in the 110° heat talking out loud to herself. No one seemed too concernered, although she was engaged in a pretty hefty argument.
You’re a writer, you know how it goes. You work out your character’s dialog, say things the way they would say them. Sometimes you find a catchy little phrase – speak quickly, my time is not my own – that you want to hold on to, because it’s exactly what your guy Hector would say.
Sound of skidmarks. I start sweating, and it isn’t the heat.
Me, spinning through the conversations I plan to write. Crazy lady having phantom conversations.
Does she know she looks crazy? Does she know the other person isn’t there? Would she believe you if you told her? If you showed her a picture, would she not see the other person in it?
Are the conversations I quietly work out in my head during my walks not quiet at all? Do I simply not see people staring at me as I pass? If you showed me a video of my solo, out loud, rambling conversations, would I even believe it?
It’s totally creeping me out, because there’s no way to tell if you couldn’t tell. Maybe we’re all sitting in cardboard boxes…
You know, writing is a lonely business. When you purposefully enter a world of your own creation, you walk a thin line between realities. Before you step in, make sure you believe what you believe. Maybe that’s what makes it such a cool art form.
Did I say that out loud?
Imagine setting up something really, really complex, like an Ocean’s 11 style casino robbery, or maybe a game of Sorry – okay, maybe not that one – but something really complex, that you’ve puzzled over for months until now, now, this very minute, you’re ready to go. To pull the trigger, dial the phone, hit Execute, or RUN, or whatever it is that sets your plan in motion. Good for you.
You’re a writer, you know how it is. You slave away over your work, because you love it, and it’s good for you, and because you have something that needs to be said.
I’m working on Novel Number 3, tentatively called The Terrible – it’s a joke that plays out in the… rats, I’ve given it away. Well, forget that part.
So, it may seem like I’m rambling, but I’m giving you crumbs. Clues, if you will. Because you’re smart, and you’ll piece it all together.
Did you get anything yet?
Sigh. Okay, here it is. I’ll use little words: I’ve started a third novel. My first, MARIGOLD’S END, is under revision, my second, DROPPINGTON PLACE, is self-published, and I can’t sit here on my hands and just die, can I? I mean, can you?
This third novel is carefully laid out, with four strong central characters. Well, it was four, but, just yesterday, I needed a transition piece, a moment that both gives us time and place and setting, but that also starts the storytelling ball rolling.
So I created this simple fellow – not much more than a name, really – to carry the news of the French ambassador’s arrival. Not so bad, huh? Except that he needed a little background, and a little definition, a little purpose…
And then the son of a biscuit stole my whole story! He’s none of the four dried up, dowdy guys I’d so carefully designed. He’s young, he’s brave, and he’s innocent. Suddenly, the four guys are bit players to this kid’s story. What the heck? It’s like Ensign Checkov taking over the Enterprise! R2D2 piloting the Millennium Falcon. Wait, what?
All seriousness aside, I’ve been thinking about this story for a while now. My first novel was a labor of love – and very, very hard to write, rewrite, and… I think I’m on the seventh version. The second novel was just plain fun – I wanted to explore Elizabethan words, and magic, and make a young adult story that was positive and generous.
This new one, tentatively called The Terrible (I think I mentioned this already – please try to keep up), is my story. It’s my… my way of giving back. It’s set on the French/Spanish border in the year 1657. No, it’s not the Three Musketeers, but that book has always been my go-to for inspiration and grounding.
So, The Terrible is the story I was created to tell. It’s the novel that I became a writer to write. It’s the story – I think. I know you have a story like that – it’s why you write.
If it turns out bad, I’ll come up with some clever way to dismiss it. But, it won’t be bad, because this is the story. This is my story.
But, and here’s the part that is just crazy, this new guy’s story isn’t mine. I’m somewhere in this book, but I haven’t found out where. You know the guy has power, because he took over my whole dang life story just by getting named!
More to follow…
You’re a writer. You know how it is. You eat, sleep, and dream with other people’s minds. What would it be like to an inch tall, you muse, or in command of a shoe? For a writer, the world is full of little what-ifs and I-wonders.
But what happens when all your questions are answered for you? When your quest to sort the world out is brought to an end.
My best friend, whom I subsequently married, and I used to puzzle over who was happier: man in his quest for answers, or the cow in the field who has no questions?
She thought that perhaps the questionless state might be a form of heaven. I argued that it seemed more likely a form of hell.
Heaven or hell, it recently presented itself to me in the form of the ultimate job. For a moment I hung up my writer’s spurs and thought I might settle in for the long haul, might hitch my horse to this wagon instead of my own.
It is hell. Might just as well shovel dirt onto my face, because there’s nothing deader than a creative that doesn’t create. Take these pencils from my hands – I don’t need them anymore.
As you’ll recall, Tigger searched the Hundred Acre Wood trying to find “what Tiggers lke best.”
What I found is that a writer is a writer is a writer, and perhaps that’s what this Tigger does best. Tiddily pom.
You. Put down those fish crackers, I’m talking to you. Serious – this is a serious talk. No goofing around about anything. Just drop the crackers.
So, what do you do? Me? I’m a writer. It’s what I do. Technical writing, a little marketing, a little blogging, a couple of novels, a couple of short stories. It’s what I do. Working on a screenplay right now.
In fact, thank you for asking, it’s a screenplay based on my own novel, Droppington Place. It’s a funny story… well, okay. You’re right. We’re being serious here.
Have you seen Kubo and the Two Strings? Lovely picture, although a tad sad. It was made by LAIKA, a film studio in Oregon that makes handcrafted, stunningly animated movies. What could be a better fit? What better film company to make a major motion picture out of Droppington Place?
As you know, I’m a proponent of Gorilla Marketing – do little, expect lots. In this mode, we ask ourselves why we must go through all the hassle of selling millions of books. Why could we not simply approach LAIKA directly, make the motion picture, and then sell the millions of books? You know, it’s not really putting the cart before the horse: it’s more like they’re side-by-side. Boom. Anything could happen.
So I set myself out to write a screenplay from the novel. Piece of cake. I know the book forwards and backwards. What if I simply move these scenes around to make it more, you know, cinematographically friendly?
Well, three things happened. Three. You were expecting two, but, hey, it was three. Sorry to disappoint.
First, in reordering the book for cinematographic friendliness, I found a much better flow to the story. Rats. Now the book needs a rewrite.
Second, in retelling the story for the large screen, I found some motivations for characters I hadn’t seen before. Rats. See above.
Third, I had a revelation. A very sad, very tawdry little revelatory affair that hurts to write about, but you’re a writer. You know how it is.
Shakespeare is quoted as having written, “to thine own self be true.”
I was on an airplane, struggling with the screenplay, when the words came to me. Poop, I thought. I don’t want to hear these words.
The words came as clearly to me as if I had written them myself, but I’m not this good. It was simple poetry, and it hurt to read. It said, “write what you want and it’ll be great.”
Write what you want and it’ll be great.
Stop plotting and planning and pushing and prodding. Stop massaging and manipulating and maneuvering and marketing. What’s in here (taps on chest) is what’s important.
“Your lungs?” I asked.
I have written what I hope will sell, and hope you will buy. I haven’t written the Great American Novel. I’ve written something clever and fun and creative, and that I think you’ll like. I like it.
But the calling is to write what’s inside, and I don’t think it’s about my lungs.
What is the story I was created to tell? What can I give to you that will be great enough to make you think, wow, my life is now better? What epic saga lies inside here (taps on chest)?
Poop.
So, compadre, we have to saddle up another horse. It’s a long ride ahead, and now there’s another wagon to pull. Please don’t put the saddle on the horse that’s supposed to pull the wagon – you’ll just confuse things.
Okay. You can go back to your fish crackers now.
You’re a writer, you know how it goes. Every moment you draw a breath is a moment to promote your book.
Well, say, I have a moment with nothing to do, and my super-smart cell phone right here. What if I take this moment to submit a query about my book, DROPPINGTON PLACE, to a literary agent.
Wait, I don’t have the manuscript… it’s parked on my Google drive, but an agent only wants the first ten pages. Hmm, how to edit it…
Wait! I sent a query to a different agent… that was a perfect letter! Alls I gotta do is find that letter and change the names and stuff…
It didn’t take long to take out the refeeencea to my dog and stuff, and change the names. That agent, the first recipient, had sent me a nice autoreply of no, thanks. I edited out references to that, too.
Just one eye in the flointment…you can’t send a letter you’ve already sent. Hmmm… no biggy. I’ll just forward it…
Okay, everything looks good…push the send and hope for the best.
Say, here’s an autoresponse from the new agent. Thank you for your submission, here’s what you sent…
And there, in the inbox of this agent, is my submission letter, followed by my submission letter to the previous agent, and then the rejection letter from the other agent!
OMG! How stupid can you be? If I don’t make it as a novelist, I can always be the mascot for Camp Stupid!
Responsive websites? I always thought your website was responsive if you just answered your emails.
You’re a writer – you know how it is. You toil and slave over your book, you publish it yourself, you get your website, your Facebook page, your logo… and then, who knew, it’s useless if your website isn’t responsive. Useless. Who knew?
While, the standard, desktop, not-so-responsive website still has value if you’re a corporation that sells oodles of things that deserve their own big pictures and stuff, the little screen, however, is clearly the road ahead.
So, what does it mean to “go responsive?” It simply means that you scale your website to look good on mobile devices. That’s it.
Sort of. Once you scale your whole website down to that itty-bitty size, you realize that your whole outlook about your website changes. Gone are the stacked images, the carefully layered pages that had a certain snap to them. Gone are the cool, zoomy galleries of your favorite pictures.
Those big, splashy pages have been replaced with simple, easy-to-read, direct-to-the-point, cell-phone sized articles and galleries and images.
It’s great news if you’re a writer, which you are. All you have to do is write! You don’t have to be a web designer? You just write – that’s really what you and I do best anyway!
PhineasCaswell.com has been a desktop site for quite a while. I built it with Open Element software – free!!! But, Open Element doesn’t support responsive websites yet. Rats.
For around $30 USD, I found Serif’s WebPlus – I’m running x7, whatever that means. It has a set of really simple templates for making a responsive website. It was seriously easy to make the conversion.
I’m trying to sell my novel, Droppington Place. It’s aimed at the young adult market, which is comprised mainly of mobile device users. Market? Meet website. Website. Market.
As you know, I’m a big proponent of Gorilla Marketing – do nothing and hope for the best. I did a little something by going responsive, and now I don’t have to do anything else. My site is ready for the world to beat a path to my door.
Ah, success.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention my other Gorilla Marketing project – you’ll like this. It’s called Soon to be a Major Motion Picture. All you have to do is download Droppington Place – do it for free, if you’d like. Encourage your friends to do the same. If your friends tell their friends, who tell their friends, who tell…you get the idea… why, we’ll be way over a gazillion reads, which is more than enough for any savvy movie studio or book publisher to jump on the bandwagon and make Droppington Place into a major motion picture. Brilliant!
So, download Droppington Place, and go tell all your friends.
This is gonna be great!
You’re washing your face in the bathroom sink. The warm water makes a pleasant gurgle as it swirls down the drain. It’s California, so you don’t run the water too long.
Suddenly, the water reverses course, and comes up out of the drain. Thinking quickly, you shut off the tap. No good. The water is gray and malicious, and soon the sink is full. It stops filling before the water spills over the edge, but just barely.
So? What do you do? The sink is full, which means the pipes under the sink are full. Are you a plumber?
In my household, I would attempt to fix it, would flood the bathroom, and never hear the end of it from my wife and teenaged daughter.
“Why don’t you just call a plumber?”
“I can fix it, honey! See, it’s just a… oh.”
Slosh, gush. Gaglub, gaglub, gaglub.
“Nice going, Dad.”
You’re a writer. You know how it is. We write, you and I. Unless you’re a marketing writer, the whole business of promotion and publicity is outside our bailiwick.
So, here we are in the world of self-publishing. I did all the work – I wrote Droppington Place, I edited it, had it read and ignored by family and friends, I published it, I created a Facebook page for Phineas Caswell, I opened a website, PhineasCaswell, and I even bought a book about Dummies marketing on Facebook.
So far, I’ve sold 4 copies of the book – three to people I know and one that might actually be legit.
By day, I’m a technical writer/illustrator. I do what I do because I enjoy it, and am good at it. I’m not a plumber, although I do get my hands wet upon occasion. But, I am a miserable excuse for a plumber.
So, my writer friend, must it be true with marketing. Here we are in the most freewheeling, enabled, and unshackled time in history for writers – dude, anyone could read your book right now! – but are fettered at the gate of success by a lack of time and marketing knowhow.
The answer is to let the plumbers plumb and the marketers market. The answer is the same as it always was: do what you do best. If you need the help of a specialist, for goodness sake, hire the specialist! Unless you can do your own dentistry.
As for me, I’ve got to fix this sink before my wife gets home… it’ll all be done and she won’t even know I did it myself until I tell her!
Crack. Gaglu, gaglug, gaglug…
If you’re sick, don’t read this post. There’s a stupid wordplay about viruses that is, well, so bad that we’re just going to skip it.
When you have just under two minutes free, watch this video: Build the San Salvador 4. How about now?
You know how people eat up those “dude, you had one job” videos? That was the thinking behind this little gem. Have to tell you, it still cracks me up, and I had a hand in making it.
So, why make a movie – especially one as dumb as this?
Three little words, my friend. No, not I love you. Or hands up, suckah. No, no, no… and no, not no, no, no either. Magic, she gasped. Ah, yes, our mantra/manta/bantha.
It’s a tight circle, my friend, this marketing thing. At the end of the video, which is calculated to be just funny enough to appeal to a certain age – the very age I’m hoping will read Droppington Place – is my new little logo, and the whispered word “magic.”
So you, you’re so fascinated by the video, you type in PhineasCaswell.Com, just like you see it in the image at the end of the hilarious video, and there is a link to Droppington Place. You click on the link – blink – why, here’s a nifty book for you to read!
Like a spider’s web, one slimy tendril at a time, you have no choice but to be roped into reading at least the free sample. Bwahahahahahaha.
It didn’t take a great deal of effort to make the motion picture. Sort of like, really? And all this linking is sort of sleep-inducing. And, at the end of the day, YOU have to do all the clicking and reading and stuff.
NOW you can see how Gorilla Marketing works… or doesn’t work, because I’m not doing much work… oy, this get’s confusing.
So, click on the link (HERE it is again in case you can’t find it up there), and repeat after me:
“Magic,” she gasped.
If you’d like to read all of Droppington Place for free, go HERE, and tell ’em you’re not paying a dime today, thank you. Boom. Freebie!
“Magic,” she gasped.
Say it again: “Magic,” she gasped.
Tell your friends to say it: “Magic,” she gasped.
It’s a mantra, unless that’s the bat-shaped fish. Whisper it in your sleep.
“Magic,” she gasped.
What is it? What does it mean? Why should you care?
What makes a Subaru a Subaru? Actually, Subaru puts a comma in their statement – a comma with which I have never agreed. Love, it’s what makes a Subaru, a Subaru. What does that second comma do? It makes a clause out of “it’s what makes a Subaru,” which isn’t a clause at all. It equally makes a clause out of “Love a Subaru,” which is a clause, but is so widely separated by the non-clause that you have to remove the non-clause to see it, by which time you’ve simply beaten the whole darned thing to death…and doesn’t make me what to buy the car because they have trouble with punctuation.
“Magic,” she gasped. It’s a mantra, or manta. Or Banta if you’re into Star Wars.
I was trying to come up with a way to sell my book, and the only catchphrase I could think of was “buy my book.”
Hmmm, lacks a little something.
Hailey, one of the characters in my novel, Droppington Place, has a fascination with magic – just to point out that there, right in that sentence, is the proper use of commas to separate a clause – which causes her to utter the mantra/manta/banta phrase. Several times throughout the story she gasps the word “magic,” in what I sincerely hope is a running joke.
So, you see, sometimes your characters can give you a hint on what’s special in your work.
But, here’s the dealio, the thing, the bomb, the cat’s pajamas: What happens if you Google search “murder, she gasped”? Well, probably nothing yet, because I just loaded the tags.
But eventually, my impatient friend, you’ll go to either Phineas Caswell’s home page at PhineasCaswell.com, or to his Smashwords Droppington Place page.
If you simply Google Phineas Caswell, whose name appears beneath the logo, brings you all manner of Droppington Placey options.
Is this marketing genius? Does Procter and Gamble sell soap?
Or is it simply some degree of self-delusion that I’m making progress in marketing my book? Self-delusional like a fox!!!
Already, the pieces are falling into place…bwahahahahah.
You, because you’re a friend, can actually skip all the marketing hype and get Droppington Place by simply clicking HERE. When you get there, type in this Coupon Code: NJ38D, and you can get the book for free!!!
Why, that seems almost like…
“Magic,” she gasped.
Stand by to eject bathwater on my mark.
Standing by, sir.
And…mark.
The bathwater is terminated.
Nice shooting, Lieutenant.
Roger that. The baby is outta here. Repeat: the baby is out of here.
Big ten four. Stand by for towelage.
Uh, negatory. Sorry. No can do.
Disregard that. Stand by to commence towelage on my mark.
Uh, sorry, skipper. No can do.
All hands, stand by. What’s with this gloomy Gus guff, Lieutenant. I believe I gave you an order.
Ten four on that, skipper. But, we don’t have, a, well…
Don’t tell me you ran out of towels.
Negative, sir. It’s just that, well, we ejected the baby with the bathwater.
Mongo Santamaria! You’re telling me we tossed the kid out the window?
Like a bullet, sir.
Well, there goes the towelage. All hands, prepare for battle stations. Angry mom at eight o’clock!
It turns out, writing a book is great fun. And it is great fun. Even though your imaginary friends, all those little voices in your head, drag you through the very depths of despair and pain and agony, the fact that you share that with them, that you are a witness to their travails – is an honor and a delight.
Oh, sure. That’s the cat’s pajamas, that part. Like ice cream for dinner every night of the week. Best of all, you tell all your friends that writing is the pits, it’s the worst – you feel like a zombie…hour after hour, typing, thinking, scribbling, coffee, beer, whatever. While, actually, your inner you goes “teehee, this is the best!”
Welp. The party’s over. They ate the pretty balloons. It’s crying time again, and you’re gonna leave me – I can see that faraway look in your eyes. Why must we get offa this cloud?
BECAUSE I PUBLISHED MY BOOK!!!
Yes, there is one more moment of glee, and that is when you join the Club of Shakespeare. All the world is a willing audience, hungry for your written words, longing for your thoughts, your ideas… and, once the book is published… Yo, lookit me, feedin’ the masses!
It’s a cerebral joy, and stunningly short-lived. I found no Disney at my door. Discovered Dreamworks dreaming of someone else. Ran across Random House randomly choosing someone else’s house.
No, the party’s over. Now comes the drudgery, the mind-numbing torture, of figuring out how to market this darned thing for real. It’s no longer a game, or a funny idea. Now it’s work, work, work, to get this product sold and out, into the sunshine where it belongs.
What? What’s that? How can you find it? Well, bless your generous soul, you have come to the right place. Let me pull your chair closer to the fire. Move it, dog. Make way for this most spectacular person.
Because you are you, and you’re a friend, I’ll let you have the book…for free!
No strings attached. Freebie. You go. Although, if you found it in your heart to write a dazzling review, I’m sure no one would be opposed to that…
Find DROPPINGTON PLACE here: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/618049
Now, this is important: type in the coupon code NJ38D. When you do, the most wonderful book you’ll download with your free coupon will be yours – for free!!!
Of course, you could also visit the author’s site, PhineasCaswell.com.
Now, to find that baby…
In the writing business… that is, the business end of the writer’s business, although the writer’s business isn’t business at all, but art – this gets so confusing – not the business of writing art, the business of selling the art, which is a business unto itself, but we’re not talking about that. Actually we are, sort of… you’re a writer, you know how it is…
Restart.
If you are a writer, and you don’t have an agent, you need one. Yes, you can self-publish your novel, but who is going to sell your book for you? You? You’re a writer. You need an agent.
Finding an agent, well that’s the business end of writing. But agents don’t seem to drop out of trees, even if you’re absolutely, fantastically talented. I know this from personal experience. That dog don’t hunt. That ship has sailed. You can’t handle the truth.
So, you advertise, in a million different ways. You blog. You join writer’s circles and clubs and chats, and comment your brains out on other people’s stuff. You work like a monkey to get your name at the top of an agent’s mystical list, the agent’s short list, the who’s who of writers in the agent’s Rolodex. Rolodex – boy, that’s a piece of history, huh? Raise your hand if you know what a Rolodex is… uh huh, as I thought. Paltry, paltry.
At the end of the day, you have to face it: you’re marketing – advertising – in the hopes of getting an agent to look at you and say “wow, now THERE’s a talent!”
In the world of Gorilla Marketing, all this effort, all this subtle, almost not work at all, is aimed at just one person. Millions of readers, or in my case, half-dozens of readers, see your blog and comments, read your name… and move on to something else.
It’s like being a daisy in the middle of the tall grass – oh please, Ms. Cow, pick me, pick me! You stand up tall, doing your flowery best to grab a little bit of bovine attention… oh, puleeze…. Of course, nobody wins in the cow analogy. Literary agents are insulted, and you get eaten if you win. But, you get the point.
The point is that if Toyota gets you to run down to your local dealership and buy a car because you saw a good ad on TV, it doesn’t matter if they wasted the time of 30 million other viewers, so long as you buy the car. No, you don’t suffer from incontinence, but some poor sap does, and those commercials might just be the ticket… say, I didn’t know they made underpants like that!
The point is this: you market your keester off, in the hope that one, just one, single set of eyeballs, sees your stuff and says a quiet “bingo.” And when that one sees your stuff and mutters and magic phrase, all your Gorilla Marketing effort pays off, and the future is yours to pave.
Well, here’s to you, my marketing friend. May you hear a whispered “bingo” soon!
Now, if you’re an agent, you can find the first two chapters of my book here: PhineasCaswell.com.
Thank you.
If you’ve read earlier posts here, you’ll know I’m developing a theory called “gorilla marketing.”
It’s really quite simple: you don’t do anything, and people beat a path to your door. Usually they bring loads of cash, and things turn out great.
Well, you don’t do nothing, actually. You do some stuff – you know, little marketing things that get people reading you and believing in you and eventually giving you the oodles of cash.
So, here, without any ballyhoo or marketing phrasing, is my pitch: the second chapter of my novel, Droppington Place, is posted on the web, here. It’s totally free.
Read it now, as the price is sure to go up.
Take out your marketing pencils, kids, and let’s just do a little analysis.
Interesting proposal – check.
Product offering – check.
Call to action – check.
Free offer – check.
Dude, it’s all there, and we haven’t really done any work. See how easy this was?
Now, for you to do your part. This involves oodles of cash, so you might want to take some notes…
Just to recap: Chapter 2 of Droppington Place is now ready to read, and you got a nice, healthy sampling of Gorilla Marketing in action.
Wow. What a great day!
Pass me a banana, would you?
It’s not good to close doors. I mean, obviously, if there’s a bear out there in the backyard, you probably don’t want to leave the kitchen door hanging open. But, in general, a closed door means something’s wrong.
The gusty winds of life sometimes close doors you meant to leave open. You think things are swimming along fine, and everybody in your life is exactly where they’re supposed to be, but, whammo, out of nowhere, you find a door has been closed.
It could be the gusty winds of life, or the dusty gathering of old age. But, most likely, the doors swing shut through inattention. Yours. Yep. There it is. You have to look in the mirror for that one, and admit, uh oh, you fell asleep.
Uh oh, Mr. Van Winkle, the kids have grown up and moved to Barstow. How did this happen? Wasn’t it just yesterday we were all so chummy? Now you’re over there, and they’re way over here, and how did you grow so far apart?
It can take a lot of work to open an old door, but it will almost always be worth it. Unless that door leads to a cranky ex to whom you owe money, you’ll usually find a warm and welcome heart, one that is just as surprised as you that the door swung shut.
A door opening to a long-time-ago besty was the inspiration for this bit of news: DROPPINGTON PLACE, Chapter 1, has been rewritten, and is better than ever! Sadly, you won’t find it on this site. But you WILL find it over here, and you can have some fun while there.
The re-opening of a door that was never shut in anger, only through inattention, is a great cause for celebration, and you’re invited to celebrate, too. Enjoy Chapter 1 of Droppington Place.
Did you notice that clever piece of marketing work right there? Dang, that is some fancy voodoo. Your heartstrings are all tied up in little knots about that door thing, and, boom, your right into the novel. You have to admit, that’s the good stuff. Now, if there was just a way to make a nickel from that!
So, here’s your job for today: first, go read Chapter 1 of Droppington Place. It doesn’t have anything to do with opening doors, but will make me feel better. Next, think, think, think about a door you have let swing shut, and go open ‘er up. You’ll be glad you did!
Some stuff is not really free – like when you buy a used car and they say it’s new to you, or when you swipe the newspaper from some guy’s porch, that paper is free to you. You know, if you discount the black mark on your otherwise spotless soul, and can overlook seeing the guy sobbing over his lost paper – “wh…where is it? I needed those coupons!”, then it’s free.
The same could be said of online piracy. That app that lets you that lets you rip an MP3 from a YouTube video can’t be very legal, although the market for the harmonica version of the Star Wars theme has to be painfully small.
When you donate your junk to the thrift store, though, you offer that stuff up for free. You’re never going to wear those bell-bottom jeans again, are you? That BeeGees Greatest Hits 8-track? So, while those are junk to you, there’s somebody out there shopping in the thrift store that just needs a pair of jeans, and will overlook the funky legs. You gave them away for free, but they had value to somebody.
That’s like this software. It’s so old that it positively creaks when you run it. But it runs. And it’s powerful. And it’s free. That last part’s the most exciting.
If you know Adobe InDesign, you know it’s a fantastic layout program, for anything from greeting cards to websites. This is version CS2, which was popular with the Flintstones, but it has all the functionality that was available away back then.
Adobe Illustrator is great, no matter what version you run. That has to be said first, because this is version CS2. No, it doesn’t feature paste-in-place, which, if you are the graphic artist type, is God’s gift to software. But it does have Duplicate, which is almost the same thing.
And Adobe PhotoShop. For Free? Hello? McFly? PhotoShop is so ubiquitous (which, it turns out, is not another word for a biscuit mix) as to be a verb on its own, as in that picture was clearly photoshopped.
In fact, the marvelously free Illustrator software was used to create the illustration for this post – yes, that’s right. The children in the lower left were hand drawn, but were image-traced into the drawing.
Oh, the things you can do!
So, free? Yes, f-r-e-e that spells free. There’s an adage that says if the product is free, you are the product, but in this case it doesn’t apply. In this case, someone found a link to software that is no value to its maker, like that groovy BeeGees tape, but still has value in the world.
Here’s the caveat – if there wasn’t a caveat, you’d need to suspicious – the software will ask you to register it. Don’t do that. It’s old, old software, and there is no registration available for it: the commands are embedded in the code, that’s all. Don’t register it, but use the heck out of it. Get this: it’s FREE!
Here’s the link: http://techspot.com/ . This will get you started with PhotoShop. Search for “Illustrator CS2” and “InDesign CS2”, and you’ll find them.
Happy softwaring!
Well, I don’t suppose it’s true that tomorrow never comes. If that happened we’d all be sorta stuck in a perpetual Groundhog’s Day scenario – say, haven’t we met, you know, today?
Disneyland of the late ‘60’s had The Carousel of Progress, a huge, revolving theater that brought you scenes of an exciting future life. The song that thrummed between the scenes told us “there’s a great big, beautiful tomorrow, waiting at the end of every day.”
At the end of this day, I’ve got to clean out the cat box – I hate cats – and do the dishes, and fix the pool pump. At the end of the day that follows this one – I won’t say tomorrow – I’ll have to fix the pool pump again, clean out the cat litter box – I hate cats – and catch up on the roughly 714,000 other little things that need doing every single day.
If, like me, you work a nine-to-five, those magic windows of sit down and think time, of play with the words time, of what-if time, well, they’re sort of like the windows of the apartment building across the street – you can look into them from here, but they are oh so hard to open.
Tomorrow is just like today, and will just the same as yesterday and the one that follows. Trudge, trudge, trudge right into the grave. Sigh.
Waaa-waaa-waaa-waaa
That’s the dinkey-toons answer. That’s the gee-I’d-like-to-be-a-writer-if-I-could-just-find-the-time answer. That, my dear writer friend, is the excuse.
The truth is that you’re a writer, and you know what that means. What time is it? Time to work, day in, day out.
Why are you changing the cat box – I hate cats – when you could be working? The dishes’ll get done, they always do, and the pool pump is a Sunday afternoon item. What’s the rush? Why put those mundane things ahead of your important, life-giving work?
Tomorrow comes when you make it come. It will be the best tomorrow you can imagine because you earned it – you worked hard and busted your knuckles to build it.
A tomorrow in which you are a passenger is just another day. The tomorrow that finds you creating, crafting, working – that’s the one to live for.
So, my literary friend, tomorrow doesn’t come. You have to bring it on.
Well, my friend, we’ve sailed over the horizon, haven’t we? I mean you, and me, and my novel, MARIGOLD’S END, the final chapter of which is now posted on this site, right here.
Yes, the final chapter, the au reservoir to our friend Phineas, and the Kathryn B, and all those cool nautical cats. If you’ve been keeping up, and I know you have, you’ll know we left young Phineas leaping for his life from a stricken ship, the crack of a pistol ringing out behind him. This book literally ends with a bang.
If you been keeping up with this blog, you’ll know that this book writing business is a twofold affair: there’s the art of writing the book, and the science of getting someone to buy it. That’s probably art, too, because, in science, you’re supposed to be able to repeat experiments and get the same results. Good luck with that in marketing!
So, you ask, what’s next?
Well, I can tell you that gorilla marketing, for all its flashy allure and exciting verbiage, is a rather slow-and-go proposition, with lots of slow and very little of anything else. The line of people lined up around the block to read my book is sort of a line of one, and my feet are complaining about standing here.
In Field of Dreams the guy says “if you build it, they will come,” which is very catchy and enigmatic. He left out the time component: they will come tomorrow, or next week, or when the moon shines bright on my old Kentucky home. Or, and this is the one we all dread, they will come one at a time, quietly, unannounced, and go away. I’m a major sucker for jingoism, but I might just have to let this one go.
If you build it, and your work your keester off to grab their attention and you give them something in return for their visit, then they will come. Writing your book and telling the world about your book isn’t enough.
You got to get up every morning with a smile on your face and BELLOW to the world about your book. If you’re a good bellower, you can convince the world to bellow on your behalf, but you have to be bellower number 1.
I’m bellowing over here, with yet another of my sneaky, hey, are you trying to confuse me?, get-rich-quick, zero effort marketing schemes. It’s a site called Phineas Caswell.com – and has an interesting premise: Phineas Caswell is the author. Well, interesting to me, perhaps. You’re a writer, you now how it goes.
What if there was this curious site to which the curious reader could travel?
I agree, the site is snoresville today, but it will change, my friend. Ohhhh, yessss, changes, they are a comin’.
So, to accommodate the change in authorship, Phineas Caswell, the nautical hero in MARIGOLD’S END, has generously agreed to change his name to Benjamin Dilbeck. Not Ben, not Benny, Benjamin. Whaaaat? You cry, aghast. Trust me, Obi Wan, you’re the only one who can… it will work.
Say, this is quite the post, eh what? A chapter released over here, a new website over there… goodness, will it ever end?
It just can’t be that hard to be Superman. Yes, your home planet blew up. Yes, you have to hide behind those dorky Clark Kent glasses in a world that thinks you really can’t be recognized behind your Ray Bans. But you can knock the crackers out of anyone who disagrees with you.
More importantly, as a Super Person, you can approach every new situation with the knowledge that there is no one stronger, faster, smarter, yada-yada-yada. That must be a pretty cool something to have in your pocket. Say what you want, evil-doer, for I have all these nifty super powers.
But you and I, we’re writers. For us, publishing our work is like Superman going up against a bad guy. I don’t know about you, but when I look in my back pocket, I only see last week’s tissue and an empty wallet. Maybe a little lint.
Every piece we publish, even dopey pieces like this, put us out on that line of pass/fail, succeed/fail, survive/fail. Out here it’s just you and me, kid, and I’m not so sure about me.
With that cheerful thought, I formally announce to you, my writer friend, that Chapter 15 of MARIGOLD’S END is now on this site.
If you’ve been reading along, and I know you have, you’d know that Phineas, Louise, and Taylor have stowed away on the Marigold, only to find the ship in pursuit of their own Kathryn B. The weather has turned foul, and Captain Jaffrey’s a demon possessed, and things can’t possibly end well for the smaller ship. Phineas has to quickly piece together a very big, very serious puzzle, and despite a horrific loss, figure out what he’s made of.
I can’t give away the ending, but I can tell you that I recently read an account of an American frigate during the revolution that experienced almost exactly what happens in this story. It’s always nice to know I got the history right.
So, Super Person, dust off your cape, get out your Krypton Reading Glasses, and peruse Chapter 15 of MARIGOLD’S END. If you haven’t read the previous, that’s okay – you’ll enjoy this one. If you have, bless you child. Thank you for your generosity.
Is it paradoxical that the guys who started all those superheroes, back in the early days of the comics, took the same chances you and I, as writers, did? Edgar Rice Burroughs had paved the character road for them a little bit, and the newspapers carried comics, but you have to applaud the courage to publish an entire graphic magazine.
I wonder if those guys wore glasses…
You noticed in my last post how I cleverly mentioned the name of my second novel, DROPPINGTON PLACE? Well, did you notice that I just mentioned it again? Boom. Right past you, there, huh? That, my friend, is marketing.
Well, actually, it’s not, because you are the only one reading this post. But, if I had, like, a million readers, boom… see?
Here’s another one: I put Chapter 14 on MARIGOLD’S END, my first novel, on the Pages part of this website. Huh? Did you see that? Huh? Right there. Boom.
The theory we’re testing here is exposure. Repetition. Repeating the name over and over. If you look over my posts, you’ll see a preponderance of pirate pictures. Ah, another part of the theory.
If the theory of repetition holds true, when I finally get MARIGOLD’S END pried out of the hands of my stalled editor and published, there will be a line of people waiting to buy it. It will virtually be a line… or maybe a virtual line. Maybe a hypothetical line. Maybe a line of one. Me.
But that’s the gamble of marketing, upsides and downturns. Read the chapter. Leave a comment. Boom. You are marketed.
Enjoyed quite a bit of Tomorrowland, the new Disney marketing vehic…film. The message is a little preachy, but, at the 80% mark I realized that there were no bad guys. How cool is that? An interesting, provocative film without an antagonist. Oops, put down that optimism, sonny, here he comes now. Bwah-ha-ha!
Bad guys in art must be a gimmick. While there are certainly bad guys in the world – if you are one, please raise your hand. Look around, kids. See? None of your friends are bad guys – overall, we’re a pretty good lot.
You know this is true, not because it rhymes, but because, if there were as many bad guys on the street as there are in the movies –on a bad-guys-per-picture ratio – you’d be lucky to get home at night. We’d be up to our armpits in evil.
My story is about a good guy who has to face out some bad guys in the meanest part of town… please. The bad guys are a contrivance, a means of creating conflict because all stories must have a central conflict.
Superheroes. How can you have a superhero if there is no evil to overcome? As an author, you must create super-villains to challenge your superhero. Boy. That sounds like comic book stuff… oh yeah, superheroes come from comic books.
In the real world, take a walk in a certain part of town and you will find disadvantaged people willing to prey on you. And, you’ll find unkind, even bad people preying on them. A real superhero would be down in that part of town, not battling super-evil geniuses, but correcting the societal imbalances that create a bad part of town in the first place.
Because life isn’t about bad guys. The conflicts in life don’t usually come from a ne’er-do-well trying to do you in. Go ahead. Shoot me. I was getting kind of bored anyway.
No, the conflict in life is much more sophisticated. It’s that ticking noise in the car. The hesitation when she says “I love you, too.” It’s the never-ending debt that hides behind you, altering your judgments.
It’s the frustration you feel when things don’t go your way. When you could do more, but don’t. When you could say the right thing, but stay silent. When the parade marches down the street, and you’re standing on the sidelines.
There are no bad guys there.
This diatribe is brought to you by my newest novel, DROPPINGTON PLACE. It’s a charming little story about an earnest boy from a broken family struggling through his parents’ recent breakup while trapped in a magical world fashioned from paper by an Elizabethan playwright. No contrivances here! I tried to make bad guys, but couldn’t . Even the scariest guy, the master sorcerer, turns out to be pretty fun.
So, when you sit down to write the great American story, maybe the story isn’t really about good guys triumphing over bad guys. Maybe it’s more basic than that. Maybe it’s about regular folks doing their best against challenging circumstances.
If you must have a bad guy, maybe you could, like, make him move away in the first chapter. Or, better, make him be a chronic cough that pops up at the worst possible moment. Yeah, triumph over that little beauty!
Thirteen. There’s no 13th floor in the building. You’re counting the nickels in your piggy bank…10, 11, 12 oh please don’t let there be just one more…ah, 14. Chapter 13 of my book MARIGOLD’S END is released on my site..
Hey, wait, that’s good news. I know you haven’t been keeping up, but I can tell you, if you had, you would not see the change of events coming in Chapter 13. No sirree, this guy would have hit you right between the eyeballs.
A little background…this is against my principles, but I like the story. 12 year-old Phineas Caswell, the son of a missing colonial American sea captain, is dragged to sea against his will by his seafaring uncle. Phineas learns about sailing ships, and a little bit about the lore of the sea.
He actually learns a lot about seasickness, meets a manta ray face-to-face, gets goaded into climbing to the top of a mast, and finds himself in perpetual trouble with the ship’s one-handed sailing master.
But that trouble is nothing compared to the adventure that slowly unfolds around him. When the sailing master takes over the ship and uses her to chase pirates, Phineas finds he must fight for his very life. Nearly drowned, kidnapped by awful cutthroats and given as a prize to the most depraved pirate in Port Royal, he has only his wits and his stalwart friends, Taylor and Louise, to bring him to safety. We hope.
The new chapter, Chapter, gulp, 13, finds him running through 18th century Port Royal, Jamaica, from the vicious Red Suarez and his henchmen, Maldonado and the purple man. He’s bumped into a great tattooed fellow as wide as he is tall, and who can mean nothing but trouble for the young lad…
There, now. You’re up to speed. There’s good seafaring stuff in there, if you’ve an interest in learning about the great age of the fighting sail. Or if you’re interested in viewing the summer of 1706 through a pair of twelve-year-old eyes. Or if you’re interesting in some great writing. Whoops…now I’ve really said too much.
Anyway, don’t forget, Chapter 13. Other there, under Pages. You won’t regret it.
Nothing says nautical mayhem like the word “avast.” Right out of the box you know the words that follow are coming from seafaring devil, a maritime monster, a nautical ne’er do well. This is because good guy pirates and Navy types don’t use the word.
You’re probably one of those Navy types, or perhaps a good guy posing as a pirate in order to accomplish some secret mission – don’t worry, we won’t tell – so we must digress: According to Merriam-Webster, avast means to stop – avast pulling on that line, mate. Avast talking like silly pirates, ye scurvy wingnut. Arrgh.
Why ever have we found the word Avast in our headline? Why, yes, you guessed it, Chapter 12 of MARIGOLD’S END, A Phineas Caswell Adventure, now has its own page. It’s over there, to port ye might say, below MARIGOLD’S END, The Novel.
In Chapter 12, Phineas is taken to The Tavern, the headquarters of Red Suarez, who is the self-proclaimed pirate king of Port Royal. While that sounds a trifle trite, the chapter itself is quite alive with daring-do and an escape that simply goes awry.
What’s going here, you ask? Well, my friend, this is Gorilla Marketing at its best, but this might be better. For a minimum of moola, youm , my writer friend, have been marketed. Bang, just like that. Boom. You didn’t even feel it, and yet, ka-slap, you have my message in your head. What is the message?
Dude, it’s in your head, okay? Do I have to spell out e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g?
So, go tell everyone you know…we’ll wait… to hurry over to this site and read that chapter. Leave comments, praise, and oodles of cash… somehow… and have them tell their friend, who is probably you, to read it again.
Avast! Ye have been marketed, ye scurvy swab!
Here’s what’s odd: I began the tale of Phineas Caswell several years ago, in the hopes of exploring the world of merchant sailing in the year 1726. He started as a nine-year-old way back when, with the first name of Jim. Since that first version he’s changed names, aged three years while losing twenty, and finds himself with a dark and difficult past, an uncertain future, and a penchant for falling into the sea. My, how we’ve changed!
You’re a writer, you know how it goes. Your characters tell you about themselves as they progress. If you’re lucky, you have the wisdom to let them… elucidate… and not go crazy over the lack of control. The story gets out eventually, either theirs or yours. If you’re lucky, it’s theirs.
Enjoy the chapter.
Avast reading, ye swab.
Just when you thought it was safe to go back to your computer…noooooooooo!
You have guessed correctly – yet another chapter of MARIGOLD’S END, a Phineas Caswell Adventure, is now available on this site. In fact, it’s right here: Chapter 11.
The tension ramps up for poor Phineas when he drops into the sea right in front of a rowboat loaded with trouble. And then, he finds himself…hey, I’m not going to tell you – you get to read it! Or, you know, call me up and I’ll read it to you!
The chapter is published as part of my publicity effort… all right, all right, call it marketing.
Slowly but surely, interest builds and builds, curiosity mounts higher and higher, until people just can’t WAIT to rush to the Internet and buy a copy!
Alternatively, you read the chapter and think hey, this guy’s not so much of a nurgle-head. Maybe I’ll read his other published works.
Hey, I’m working on that, okay?
Have fun with the new chapter – I had fun putting it together.
Go ahead, say what you will. Get it out of your system. Shameless, tasteless, bad form, bad ‘cess to it. Fie on thee. There you go. Are you through?
The cause of this invective, as you well know, is that I put together a cute little video about a model sailing ship, announcing its YouTube launch on a sister page, Droppington Place.
Nobody watches it, but, well, as you’re the only person reading this post, low ratings are no shock to me. Rather a low par for a very lonely course. You’re a writer. You know how it goes.
So, there were some little cranky-making nits and gnats in the movie – not enough to stop a would-be Steven Spielberg like myself, but perhaps enough to make a would-be watcher say dude, what was that?
Although no one has watched the move, there is still the profession to be honored. Plus, one never knows.
Hours under the cinematic hood resulted in this: TA DA!!!
Hey, you say, I didn’t watch the other video, but this video sure looks the same.
You, my hyper-critical friend, are only halfway right. Yes, the majority of images are the same. But, there are some pretty big deal changes.
Some of the images are taken from other photography sessions – one shows even an incomplete ship. Ho HO, did not see that coming, did ya?
But, here’s the shameless marketing part – one of the images, a 7 second segment, shows the cover of my novel, MARIGOLD’S END. The cover features the same ship model, dramatically blowing up in the background.
Genius, I know.
AND, if you look carefully at that one shot of the crew on the deck, some joker cleverly inserted the face of yours truly in the background. Oh, so clever.
Say what you will, this is a great example of cross-platform marketing.
If somebody ever watched my video, they might wonder about what that dramatic book cover is.. about… and Google MARIGOLD’S END, and, bang, zoom, the circle remains unbroken.
Not only that, but the casual reader of Droppington Place, and there is only one of those, now has a link to the video, which leads back to the book. Ah, the web, the web…
Obviously, with only one reader and no video watcher, the full effect of my marketing tour-de-force has yet to be felt. But give it time…-150-200 years or so, and then we’ll have something about which to converse.
So, the video is here: Black Swan by Zvezda, and the launch article is here: Hello, Hollywood!
Zoom! You, my writer friend, have been mar-ke-ted… see how easy it is?
Next I think I’ll write a song…Marigold’s End, the Theme from Marigold’s End, the Phineas Caswell Adventure.
Now that’s a catchy title!
I’m likin’ it!
You’re a writer. You know how it goes.
We work our brains out on a piece, twisting it, turning it, ripping it up, tossing it out, starting over again. And that’s just the first paragraph. It’s like trying to knit with a garden hose. Or a snake. Or your cat’s tail.
Eventually we win the day – the paragraph, she’s perfect. Not one word out of place – the Pulitzer committee is about to call any old second – gosh, I hope they have my cell phone number. I’ll just said the ring to uber loud so I won’t miss the call… you know, if I’m in the tinkletorium or something. Maybe I’ll take it in there with me…just in case.
The words, they flow like spilled milk on a linoleum floor.
Hello? Pulitzer folks? Oh, it’s you, Mom. Can’t talk – I’m doing brilliant work right now. Have to keep the line open for the ol’ PC – of course you don’t tell Mom that, but it’s in your head.
And then pass the days, the weeks, the months. We sort of give up on the Pulitzer folks – clearly they don’t have our cell phone number.
And then, quite by accident, we glance at a sentence in our epic piece, the piece of OMG-This-Is-BRILLIANT literature, and we spot a typo. The guy’s name is Phil, not Phirl.
First comes disbelief: how did we miss that? How come spell checker didn’t get it?
Then comes justification: well, that’s why we hire editors, right? Don’t they catch stuff like that? What’s one typo? Nobody’s perfect.
But, a piratey ghost enters the room. What do we know about pirates? Thieves and brigands, right? Out only for themselves, right? Ne’er do well cads. What do we know about ghosts? Scary, totally dead folks, right? This is a bad combo.
The piratey ghost tells us we’re a lousy writer. We glance at a single page of a 75,000 word tome, just one page, and we spot Phirl. Holy crackers, how many Phirls’ are in there? What else did we miss, if we missed Phirl? Real writers at least spell their character names right. Real writers don’t make stupid mistakes like this. Rookies and dimwits do stupid stuff like this. No wonder we have our day jobs.
And, the thing about piratey ghosts is that they speak with such conviction…with the occasional whoo-OOOOO-ooo thrown in to remind you that they have otherworldly connections. They must be speaking the truth. I mean, why would a piratey ghost lie?
Well, you’ll find not one but TWO chapters of my Phineas Caswell novel, MARIGOLD’S END, over there on the left. Chapters 9 and 10. And, in copying ’em onto this site, I spotted a, well, a slight… well, it’s fixed now.
They are both bang-up chapters. Full of that stuff that makes you go -say, that’s good stuff. Bang up. Read ’em, let me know what you think of ’em. I’ll sit right here by the Comments box. And, if you’re on the Pulitzer committee…
Aaargh, and whoo-OOOOO-ooo, matey. Ye cannot write yer way out of a Martha Stewart luminary. Har HARRR!
But you’re a writer. You know how it is. You know that 99% of the goomers who want to be writers are sitting at home wondering why they’re not writers. You did it. You wrote a book. Or several books. You did it.
Begone, piratey ghost entity! Take your snide comments with you! Blast your infernally eternal ectoplasmic hide! Pick on someone who hasn’t written a book – someone who hasn’t ground their keyboard to dust looking for just the right word, precisely the right image, the heart, to make a scene come to life. Begone, useless spirit. You ain’t nothin’ but a bit of bad cheese!
Take heart, my writer friend. You are writing – bingo, you’re ahead of the piratey ghost. You work and work and work to make your stuff better and better. You might inadvertently type Phirl instead of Phil, and sort click on ignore by mistake when the spell checker finds it. It happens. Around here, a lot.
Take heart. Omelettes are not made with complete eggs. You have to whisk the batter to make a pancake.
Don’t look back, except to see how much you have accomplished.
Stupid piratey ghost.
There’s a great deal of adventure in writing an adventure. You’re a writer. You know how it is.
The characters, their needs, the plot, the danger of plot holes, the words, the need to make beautiful sentences, the structure, the never ending quest for pace… all those sit down for a moment when you write the adventure part of an adventure.
When the “adventure moment” strikes, you, the writer, suddenly find yourself swept away in the drama. The moment surrounds you, and takes you off into the depths of the battle, or the storm, or the chase, to the very heart of the excitement. There is nothing finer than that.
Chapter 8 of my novel, MARIGOLD’S END, is now on this site, and here we find adventure unbound. The little Katheryn B is beset by pirates – but them ain’t your Disney pirates…there be no amusement park rides here, mate. We never leave young Phineas’ side as he wends his way around the ship… adventure here, me hearties. Gosh, I hate pirate language.
Look to port, dear reader, and you’ll find it.
The hardest part of adventure writing comes after it’s been written, and you, dear writer, must go back into the moment and edit out the bad writing, close the plot holes, rework the pace, and fair the adventure into the storyline. It’s the hard work, made worse by the fact that you’ve already lived this adventure!
Still, that’s why we writers earn the big bucks. You’re a writer. You know how it goes.
You’re a writer. You know how it is.
The time to write…when is the right time to write? Now? Nope, busy reading this post. When you finish this post? Maybe. But, if you’re like me, there are a million other things to do. More important things. Scrub the toilets. Sort the recycling. You know, I’ve been meaning to seriously detail my Barcalounger.
And so, there the project sits. The characters have all gone speechless…nothing to say because you’re busily sorting the soup cans in the kitchen. Arranging the forks just so in the silverware drawer.
Life can be so crazily hectic that it becomes nearly impossible to cleave out the time to work on a project. And yet…and yet…maybe not so, grasshopper.
There is another agent in the mix…something to which you and I should pay attention. You won’t like it.
Once upon a time, a motivational speaker said that everybody’s tired. Tired of this, of that. Too tired to make a change. But, she said, what if I gave you a hundred thousand dollars of mad money? Then you wouldn’t be so tired, would you? You’d feel fresh and vibrant, alive with joie de vivre.
So, it ain’t the tireds. It’s the motivations.
That book gathering dust on your word processor? It ain’t the lack o’ time, me bucko. It’s the lack of motivation.
Well, jeepers Mr. Monkeypants. How do I fix that?
Good question, Sullivan.
Abuse some characters. Chop ’em up, or blow ’em up. Or make them say things so horrific that their world is forever altered.
Does it mess up your story line? Oh, heck yeah. Does it mess up the whole book?
“No,” Mr. Monkeypants says firmly, “your book was already messed up. That’s why you were busily knitting underwear for the pet salamander you were thinking about renting. That’s why counting the holes in the colander is more appealing that working.
Your. Book. Stinks.
It stinks so badly that even you, yes you, don’t want to put energy into it.
Admit it. Face it. Fix it.
Kill somebody. Blow something up. Sink the ship, burn down the house, turn Uncle Ray into a zombie. Ch-ch-change it.
Challenge your characters and you challenge yourself.
And if your book is so boring that you’d rather sort socks than write it, you need a good stiff challenge.
The time is there…are you?
Okay. I’m, like totally out of breath after writing that stuff. How about you?
You’re not writing your book because you’re reading this post.
So, I’m not working on DROPPINGTON PLACE because I’m writing this post. My bad.
Promise me you’ll do something to spark interest in your work.
Thank you. Now I have to figure out which guy to kill in my book! Continue reading “Time and the Fragile Character”
The most basic tenet of Gorilla Marketing is “let somebody else do the work. Do nothing and expect big results.”
In that spirit, I humbly present MARIGOLD’S END, Chapter Seven.
Aye, Chapter Seven. Taylor finds himself assigned to the galley, and Phineas discovers that Mr. Lourdburton is a…. hey, wait a minute. I see your trick. You’re trying to pry the story from me again. Well, it won’t work, me bucko!
Gorilla Marketing, Tenet One: make somebody else do the work. Playing my own game on me, were ya? Well, it won’t work. Although, I will tell you, this chapter is pretty cool.
Those of us that are newbies to this publishing game have to look at our written work a little differently than old, established hands. Our work doesn’t hold a candle to the latest piece by Rowling.
While ours might be just as good, we don’t have the name, the publicity, the chutzpah behind us. Somewhat lacking in marketing horsepower, are we.
Instead, you and I must look at our noveling efforts as an Enterprise. No book is a one-off. No road can be a simple what-if.
As I don’t have a huge number of remaining years to develop my Enterprise, I must rather compress my activities into a number of simultaneous projects.
In my Plan 2021, I’ve laid out sequels to DROPPINGTON PLACE and MARIGOLD’S END, and am putting thoughts together on a third series.
Holy Backers, Cratman, that’s a buncha novels, doncha think? Especially while you’re still learning how to write a novel in the first place? Enterprise, my friend. It’s all about the Enterprise. How many of these pieces will be written? Who knows. Maybe MARIGOLD’S END will be a runaway hit and I can find my estate in Ireland or something. Maybe a comet will hit us tomorrow and smash us all to smithereens.
Life is too short for what-ifs.
So, visit my Pages page, right now, before the comet hits, and rumble down here.
I know you’ve been keeping up – this new chapter is one sweet ride.
You’re a writer – you know how it goes.
You’re working feverishly on a project, everything fits like fingers in a bowling ball. And then, when you absotively least expect it…whammo, like a two-by-four to the forehead: the deadly stall. A character says something that reveals a plot hole so big you could fit a Buick in it.
In DROPPINGTON PLACE we simply ran out of story. It was great fun, and everybody was lively and having a good time. And then, around 42,000 words or so, Arvy, a perfectly nice kid who was sadly turned to paper, paused and looked at me.
“I’m bored.”
“You can’t be bored! You’re, like, a key player in this thing.”
“Yada, yada, yada…key player this. If I’m such a hotshot, give me something to do.”
A quick review of the Something To Do cabinet revealed empty shelves. And there Arvy sat, with so pained an expression he was impossible to look at.
That’s okay, because we can just change horses right here in the middle of the stream and work on another project that’s been a’hangin’ around.
A couple of weeks on the new project, just starting to feel it, and, son of a biscuit, here’s a new idea: something for Arvy to do.
“Leeme see, lemme see, lemme see!”
“Sit down, Arv…or, I guess sort of fold yourself ‘cuz you’re, like, made of paper…we need to plot this out a little bit.”
“Well, I categorically demand that you cease work on your new project and give me a challenge!”
So, we drop the reins on the new horse and leap back on the first one.
Their must be some old story about fording a river and changing horses in which something bad happened. I’ll bet you it has to do with Conestoga wagons. Let’s pretend it does, okay?
So, like, what’s the point?
I know, right?
The point is this: when you hit a creative wall with a project, it’s perfectly cool to start a new one. If the old one calls during the new project, it is equally cool to go on back to it.
One suggestion: make lots of notes on each project. Although today the plot thread is perfectly clear, tomorrow… well, after all, tomorrow is another day!
Frankly, Scarlett, I’m changing horses!
You’re a writer. You know how it goes. You run like a monkey on a story, and then, blammo, like a ton of jelly, the story stops. The characters all turn and look at you expectantly.
“Well?”
“Don’t ask me! You’re the character! You’re supposed to tell me what to write! I’m just the translator.”
So, there you sit – the words of your last sentence dangling in the air like the tail of a kite that is slowly, slowly sinking down to the ground. Crash.
What do you do? What do you do? I get in a really bad mood, and am foul and cranky until somebody says something. It’s like a Mexican standoff, and there’s no way I’m going to blink first. No, senor, it is you who must say the first word…
A better option, and one I read somewhere and therefore cannot take credit for, is to embrace a different project. I’ve started the detailed synopsis for SAN CRISTOBAL’s DEFENSE, another Phineas Caswell adventure.
In this new book, see, Phineas and Uncle Nev…. hey, wait a minute. I see what you’re doing. Nice try, bucko, but it won’t sell soap. I’m not telling you about this new book until you read the first one. Well, okay, you don’t really have to read it. But you do have to wait for all of the chapters to get published.
But I’m not giving away the ending, which I would be if I told you about the San Cristobal. Paradoxically, I am giving away MARIGOLD’S END, one measly chapter a week, but not the ending. However do serial writers do it? Serial killers, well, that’s pretty straight up. And cereal killers – I have one of those in my very household.
Which leads us to the point of this diatribe: Chapter 6 of MARIGOLD’S END is now on the Pages part of this site. If you’ve been keeping up, and I know you have, the author cleverly introduces the reader to the intriguing lore of the sea through the eyes of a twelve-year-old-dude-I-don’t-wanna-be-a-sailor kind of young man. In Chapter 6, we find that learning to be a sailor isn’t always about the wind and the waves. Sometimes, it’s about men.
Oh, so NOW you’re interested, eh? Shoulda seen that coming!
Enjoy the chapter – it was great fun to write.
Good luck with your writing, and, remember, if you get stuck, do what I do, and throw a tantrum start another project.
If you’ve been reading the chapters of my book, MARIGOLD’S END, you’d know that I’m releasing it one chapter at a time onto this site. You could figure it out by reading my posts, of course, including this one, but I’m trying to make you thing “dude, I should be reading that book instead of playing Candy Crush Saga.”
Not that I have anything against Candy Crush Saga – in fact, I’ve given up all on-phone video games for Lent – or your reading habits. None of my business. Nope. Nosiree Bob.
So, there it is. Where is this going, you wonder. And well you should, for I do, too.
Here’s where: Chapter 5 is now on the site. My boy Phineas, 12 years old in 1706, is taken to sea against his will by his seafaring Uncle Neville. He’s had a narrow escape with murder (committing it), nearly been drowned, suffered through near-terminal seasickness, and now has learned about the superstition surrounding a “Jonah.” Ah, but the deep blue sea holds more adventure for our young man – he’s about to meet Taylor, a slightly older, terribly well educated sprout of a fellow, and Louise, the granddaughter of the King of France.
If you aren’t reading along, you’re missing out.
And don’t be expecting me to come on here and tell you the whole darned story – not going to happen, mate. Nope. There’s a big ending, but I can only hint about that.
Here’s the hint: it’s big. Another hint: it’s at the end.
You’re a writer. You know how it goes. The world doesn’t necessarily come looking for your book. You have to coax it, wheedle a little here and there, to generate interest and talk. Buzz. You gotta build the buzz. Sounds like a bumper sticker.
Your publicity should be gentle, but persistent. Nobody likes a showoff, and most people don’t appreciate self-aggrandizing fanfare. So you have to be nice, and, like me, terrifically humble. Okay, brilliant is in there, too. Did I mention brilliant?
You don’t have to read my chapter, but take a page from this forum (as you know, only the humbly brilliant refer to their soapboxes as forums) and think about being nicely, humbly persistent in publicizing your work.
Notice that the word ‘marketing’ hasn’t shown up anywhere in this…oops, there it is… because you and I, we no longer market our work. We publicize it.
Good luck in your publicizing efforts, enjoy the chapter, and be nice.
First, let me thank you for reading this.
I know, that seems like a really cheesy ploy to get you to read on, because now you’re guilted into it. And it would be (I wish I’d thought of it first), except that I really mean it: thank you. Now, is this “thank you” sincere, or an even cheesier ploy to guilt you into reading this post, which is really insidious (I don’t suppose it’s true that farmers live in the country, city folk live insidious. Equally not so is it that mackerels are facetious).
Sadly, this is a sincere thank you for an interest in my post. Without you, well, all my work comes to naught. So, once more, thank you.
Okay, so, now for the gorilla marketing part – are you ready? Gorilla marketing: do very little, expect very much. Make somebody else do the work. And today, YOU are that somebody else!
Chapter 4 of my novel, MARIGOLD’S END, is now on this site. Yes! Can you believe it?
Now, don’t click over there and start reading it yet…hey, you! Click back over here!
See, here’s where you do the work and I reap the marketing rewards. You read the chapter, and its predecessors, and realize that you really like this story. “Heavens,” you say to yourself, “I wonder where it will go next?”
Got that? Write it down if you have to.
Then, and this is the tricky part, you tell all your friends about how great this book is. See? I haven’t done a thing, but now MARIGOLD’S END is practically a household name in your social circle.
Ook. Ook. Pass me a banana. I’ll be lounging in the hammock if anybody needs me.
All seriousness aside, thank you for reading.
Oook.
You just gotta love a sequel, huh? What better way to follow up a mega blockbuster hit than with another blockbuster? Boom, looka that, folks, something even better!
Well, in the spirit of gorilla marketing, I’ll go you one better than a sequel.
Howzabout this; Chapter 2 of DROPPINGTON PLACE? Oh, yeah, uh-huh, fist-bumps all ‘round.
Wha-aa-aat? Sonny Jim, you’re just plain givin’ away the whole dignity-danged store!
No I aint, Pa. I swear it. It’s a new market thing program about monkeys. All the cool folks ‘r doing it.
In today’s hurly-burly, gotta-make-a-buck world, you have to stand out of the crowd. You have to be the one. The one. You. If you don’t, the world will run right over you.
Think about this Internet. Right this instant, you can look up, like, a gazillion books for free. Books on just about anything, and fiction, and graphic novels, and whatever you want.
When you put your hard-earned words into that maelstrom, unless you just happen to be a Hemingway, or a Rowling, or a King, or another author more current whose name I should know but don’t because I’m actually an uncultured boob, you get lost in that rush of online pieces, just another salmon in the dash upstream.
So, you have to stand out. You have to be different. You have to be the one sought out by your readers.
Enter the gorilla wearing a tie.
GO: “I say, old bean, why not publish your work in a blog first, eh?”
JR: “But, jeepers, Mr. Rilla…”
GO: “Go, please.”
JR: “Oh, okay. Goodbye.”
GO: “No, don’t leave, you ninny. Simply call me Go. No need to be formal.”
JR: “Oh. Anyway, Go, nobody reads my blog.”
GO: “Surely someone does.”
JR: “Well, I guess there are quite a few…”
GO: “There you are. Publish your book, one chapter at a time, to your readers. They’ll read it, talk amongst themselves, and before long, why, they’ll be clamoring to… “
JR: “To buy my books?”
GO: “No, to have you hanged. I’ve read your stuff. You should be ashamed.”
So, in the spirit of Go Rilla, the marketing monkey…
GO: “Ape, if you please. Great ape, in fact.”
DROPPINGTON PLACE, Chapter 2, is now released on my Droppington Place blog, here. You can also follow the link at the bottom of this page to the Droppington Place site.
Enjoy!
Are you ready for the next installment of MARIGOLD’S END? I’ll bet you are – you there, my writer friend, sitting on the edge of your seat wondering, wondering, wondering whatever happens to Phineas next.
At least, I hope it’s you. Nobody else in the room, that I can see. Yep. It’s you. Try to form a line there, would you please? A line of one rather resembles a dot, doesn’t it? Well, please form an orderly dot.
Writing is a lonely business. Your garret, or office, or room, or swimming pool deck, wherever you do your writing, fills up with characters, talking, laughing, fighting, sleeping, doing whatever it is that they do. Then you turn off the word processor, and, voila, it is only you.
No one is very much interested in you while you write, because, frankly, you are uninteresting when you write. Not as a person, mind you, but as company, because you’re in the room filled with all those interesting characters. The real people around you just sort of hang in limbo until you snap off the word processor. Oh, THERE you are!
So you, my dotted friend – dotted by virtue of being a line of one – are the witness to the publicity and hoorah surrounding the release of Chapter 4. Hoorah!
Chapter 4 introduces us to the life of a sailor. Chapter 1 introduced us to Phineas, Chapter 2 to the perils of traveling by boat in the early 1700’s, and Chapter 3 to the indescribable job of seasickness. Now we’re past all that and exploring the Kathryn B, and what it means to be a sailor.
In MARIGOLD’S END, you learn about the new world into which Phineas is thrust only through his eyes – a challenge to write, but hopefully not to read. Like you, Phineas’ learning comes through total immersion. It be sink or swim in the briny deep. You’ll find it over there, on the left, under MARIGOLD’S END, the Novel. See, it sort of drops down, ready for reading’!
So you, dear dot of a writer-friend, are in for a treat.
Let me know what you think. Drop me a line, leave me a comment, send me a mental note.
If you are a new dot, please be so kind as to stand next to the other dot, thereby forming a line.
A line! They’re lining up to read my work!
I KNEW this day would come!
Now, if I can just get ‘em to pay!
