Expectations

I’m down to twenty readers, but I am assured that all of you are real people instead of bots or that the CIA is no longer reading this for hidden messages — just kidding. I think. Thank you for following me.

I’m at a loss as to how to get more readers. This is my big worry about embarking in self-publishing as well. In a world where everything is screaming for attention, how does one actually get attention? Quality is not enough, as is evidenced by many industries — music, books, movies — where the hyped gets more interest than the small shining gem of a creation.

What’s enough? I’ve never stopped to consider this.

Expectations have a way of expanding. At the beginning of this journey, I didn’t know if I could write 50,000 words. Then, as I reached that point, I expected to be able to write whole novels which grew to 80,000 words or more. Then I expected to get published, which hasn’t happened yet but could happen if I self-published. Yet now I expect to have more than twenty people read my blog. And I expect them to comment occasionally.  

 Maybe I should scale my expectations down. Maybe twenty faithful readers are enough. Maybe self-publishing, with its potential of only a handful of readers, is enough.  


Another round of killing my darlings

This morning, I’m editing a story for a short story contest. When I first wrote the story, I wrote it as an origin story for one of my characters and an exploration into cross-cultural relationships. For the contest, I knew I would have to edit out about 500 words to meet the word count.

But then, in the middle of editing words out, I realized several things. First, that the story could and should stand alone from its original purpose, so I edited out references to the magical realism world it came from. Next, embarrassingly, that there wasn’t enough tension in the story to make it memorable. I want to place the biggest part of the tension internally, not externally, even though there’s tension in the relationship between the two characters as well.

Writing is this process in which getting the ideas down on paper is only the first part. Refining the story into something that’s not just readable but skillful becomes the harder part. The hardest part is looking at what you’ve written with a critical eye, carving away parts of the story that do not serve their purpose, no matter how much one loved them when they were written. This is why the rule of editing is “Kill your darlings,” because in effect that is what the writer does in polishing.

 I’m off now to kill my darlings.

My Sanctum

As I have mentioned before, one of the things that saves me from severe winter blahs (aka Seasonal Affective Disorder) is my planning for the spring garden. 

I should explain that my garden has rules: everything I plant in it should be, at least in part, edible*. This means that I landscape with edible flowers, herbs, and plants that have been gathered and eaten in American or other cultures. Most of these can’t be found in nurseries or are rather expensive if bought as plants, so I grow them from seed myself in my grow room.**

 Here is a view of my grow room, which is a small basement room that used to be the coal room back when my 100-year-old house was a youngster: 

Not very impressive, is it?



The wires are for all the fluorescent fixtures and the heat pads — and the ancient iPad repurposed for record keeping that you see at your left.  The wall that you can’t see is lined with reflective material that was meant to insulate a garage door. Peel and stick — excellent for increasing the light in this room.

The flats you see are for two sets of items I’m growing — the edible nightshades (tomatoes, peppers, eggplant) and a handful of herbs (celery, lovage, yarrow, calamint, perilla, hyssop, alpine basil herb).

Closeup of my first herb flat

I have more to plant — I’m waiting on seeds for my moon garden and more herbs and for some flowers (and for lots of things that will get planted directly in the garden. By the time I’m done, I will have six to eight flats of seedlings to nurture.

Not all of them will survive. Past seedlings have succumbed to damping off disease (which I fight heroically with cinnamon water spray) and watering malfunctions. Some seeds never come up. On the other hand, sometimes they grow faster than I expected, which is why I’m setting the top shelf (that you don’t see) for taller seedlings to reside. I will save the best of the plants that come up for planting come spring.***

Spring comes to me sooner than to most because of my grow room, with its ugly cement floor and worn shelves. Today I sat with my seedlings, thinning them out so that they could grow strong, and feeling, if not happy, a bit less out-of-sorts.

* This year’s exception is the moon garden, which is comprised of white, night-scented flowers, most of which are toxic to deadly if eaten.

** When I say “grow room”, people think I’ve got one of these high-tech setups advertised on eBay where people grow — well, plants that are illegal to possess or use in this state. Mine is not nearly so exciting.

*** This doesn’t count the direct-seeded vegetables. I have to admit that I’m not as good with these because it gets too hot to weed and there are so many weeds. I’m working on using more mulching and earlier morning weeding.

Light

This time of year depresses me — literally — with its dark mornings and uniform bleakness of the terrain. It’s not the deep despair of my bipolar depression, but a constant sense of flatness, of anhedonia, of just wanting to stay in bed. The festivities of Christmas that buoyed up my spirits have long passed; all now is grey.

My psychiatrist has prescribed 1 hour a day in my grow room for light therapy. There’s plenty of light in the small basement room, supplied by eight fluorescent light fixtures. And, although it’s a small room, there’s a table and chair where I can sit and even an old iPad I use to maintain my plant records.

And then there’s the plants. Right now, I have starts of herbs like hyssop and calamint, celery leaf and Asian celery, and my tomatoes and peppers popping out of the ground. For the most part, they’re tiny seedlings with their seed leaves no bigger than a baby mouse’s ear. But they’re alive, and I almost believe I can feel the light of their lives brightening my day.

In the gloom of this season, I will take all the light I can get.

Valentine’s Day according to economics

When I’m not writing, I am a family economist/behavioral economist. The philosophy behind both of those is that I study the use of time, money, and other resources — in household units and in a manner that accounts for psychology.

Running Valentine’s Day through the economics filter yields interesting results.

Take, for example, Valentine’s Day as a method of conspicuous consumption, and the role of social media in creating the conspicuous part. Today, people will post pictures of flowers, restaurant meals, and possibly engagement rings or jewelry. The gifts may be given from the heart; the need to post pictures on Facebook and Instagram comes from a desire for the world to know the value of the item. 

Or for that matter, Valentine’s Day as an exploration of assortative mating. This is an economic concept borrowed from sociology that posits that people get sorted into couples based on complementary resources and similarity of levels of resources. Thus the stereotype that the rich man gets the trophy wife — there’s a little truth to the stereotype, according to the assortative mating theory. So, in effect, we don’t marry someone out of our league — we marry someone that complements us. And we marry as much for their resources combined with ours as we do love and romance.

And let’s not even mention that chocolate in a heart-shaped box costs much more coming up to Valentine’s Day than it does the day after. That’s pure supply and demand. 

I take advantage of this last economic fact by celebrating Half Price Chocolate Day tomorrow.


Seeking direction again

(Note: I am experimenting with larger print for a reader of mine.) 

Idea for my next book from the idea file:

Luke Dunstan, 6000-year-old Archetype, serves as a liaison between the immortal Archetypes and the humans whose cultural DNA the Archetypes hold. An edict from the Archetypes’ Maker bids the Archetypes prepare to return these memories in the trust of the humans. Facing their loss of identity, the Archetypes draw battle lines; countless human lives are at stake. It is up to Luke and one young woman, Leah Inhofer, to stop the battle of Archetype against Archetype.

*******


I really need to get back into writing. Or at least editing.

I’ve been editing a bit, but even then I often skip out on it because it’s tedious to go through a document to kill all the extra “have had has was were”. I haven’t written on a novel since finishing Whose Hearts are Mountains in December. I have some old ideas in my file (see above) but no new “a-ha” falling in love with the idea motivation.

Writing the blog every day, as I mentioned yesterday, is my lifeline to writing. As long as I write in my blog I’m still a writer. Right?

I’m afraid that if I keep getting rejections, my current lack of commitment puts me in an easy place to just walk away. This might be a good thing for me in the greater scheme of things, but it’s not good when I think about being a writer.  

So I’m musing about what to do. Again. 

 

Why I write (almost) every day

For those of you who have been following me, you know that I write this blog almost every day, sometimes twice in a day. I write first thing in the morning, right after breakfast, before tending to the other duties of the day. Usually, I write this sitting on my living room couch, lap desk in lap, typing on a Microsoft Surface. There’s usually at least one cat nearby — today, Buddy is taking up Richard’s seat on the couch.

There are many reasons I write this blog daily. The first reason is because it’s a writing habit, I haven’t written on a novel in a couple of months because I’ve been editing prior novels for developmental edits, but I’m still writing. I’m still keeping my fingers limber and my ideas fresh for when I start noveling again. (Is ‘noveling’ a word? My spellcheck doesn’t think so.)

A second reason is because I feel a rapport with my readers. I estimate there are only about 20 of you regular readers, and that most of you are people I know. A few of you I’m pretty sure I don’t know, given that you come from places I’ve never been to like Germany, France, and Portugal.  I like to write for you, and I’m glad you’re reading.

 A final reason is that I hope to be published someday, in which case I’ll need to have a blog, because it’s what writers do. You regular readers know that I fret about whether I’ll be published, and some days I feel down about it. I feel down about it today, as a matter of fact. Keeping a blog helps me hope that the rest of the trappings of being published — readers, recognition — will come to me.

Sasha, my ghost cat

I’m hopeful my ghost cat has moved in again.

I suppose I should explain my ghost cat. Some thirty-two years ago, when I was a graduate student, I owned a small, feisty black cat named Sasha.

I lived in a second floor, one-room apartment in an old house, with the porch roof just outside one window and access to the wooden fire escape out the side window. In the Illinois summers I had no air conditioning, so I tried to keep cool with a box fan and open windows.

I wanted to keep Sasha an indoor cat because I lived on a relatively busy thoroughfare in Champaign. Sasha had her own agenda. She found a way to pop the screen out of the front window, stroll across the porch roof to the fire escape, then bound down the stairs. She would eventually sneak upstairs with one of the other residents and sit outside my apartment door until I returned home.

Until the time she didn’t. Tommy, the alcoholic hippie down the hall, strolled upstairs that evening to announce that he put a dead cat in the dumpster and figured it was mine. My friend down the hall and I actually raided that dumpster at 10:30 at night to find the reeking garbage bag that contained the remains of my Sasha, and buried her on university farm property.

Soon, another cat found me, a grey and white polydactyl I named Kismet, who followed me halfway across town to become my cat. It was fall by then, and I no longer needed to keep my windows open. Kismet, like all young cats, would go into a chasing-nothing sort of frenzy, running around the small apartment, bouncing off the walls.

Except. Except that he would stop at the window, the window that Sasha used to break out of, and peer around the corner to the side of the porch, then run around to the side window as if watching something go down the stairs. And then friends would come and ask me if I had a cat, and I explained that Kismet was out somewhere, and they would ask, “What about the black cat?”

Eventually I moved, and moved again, and moved halfway across the country and back again, and I forgot about Sasha. But then, day before yesterday, my cat Chuckie started chasing around the living room. I thought nothing of it because cats do that. But then he turned a hard right and slammed into the French doors to the dining room. He stared into the dark room as if he saw something we didn’t, something that crept away from him.

If Sasha has found me again, I welcome her with open arms.

Thinking of chocolate.

Today in Maryville,MO,  the First Presbyterian Church holds its Nth annual Chocolate Festival. Consisting of two parts — the chocolate dessert bar and the take-home chocolatey cookie and candy bazaar — it’s an opportunity to treat oneself to a pre-Valentine’s Day indulgence.

Chocolate has become synonymous with Valentine’s Day in the US (So has Halloween, but Halloween candy isn’t GOOD chocolate). Probably because in the lab, chocolate consumption has been linked to oxytocin secretion by the body, and oxytocin is the cuddle chemical. The jury is out on whether you can bribe someone to love you by giving them chocolate, however. (Note, you can also get oxytocin by hugging a friend, an animal, or even a stuffed sloth.)

I prefer my chocolates at the extremes — very bittersweet dark chocolate and white “chocolate”, that cocoa butter confection that just melts. Mass-produced American chocolate leaves me cold; Belgian and Swiss chocolate make me very happy. Chocolate caramel, chocolate truffles, chocolate-coated marzipan … but not chocolate-covered raisins or gummies.  My favorite chocolatier in the US is L. A. Burdick, but I can’t afford their chocolate (well, I could, for a treat. However, I can’t afford their shipping.) They produce their chocolates with imaginative fillings that vary with the seasons and holidays. They just got done producing their Lunar New Year Asian-inspired chocolate palette; now they’re in the middle of Valentine’s season now.

I’m looking forward to the Chocolate Festival today. Don’t tell anyone, but I actually like caramel better than chocolate, and my favorite dessert at the festival tends to be the chocolate pecan pie bars. This doesn’t mean that I won’t eat good chocolate when it’s shown to me.