Seven Election Year Resolutions

Where Have I Been?

A number of months ago, in the final stages of publishing my book, Life with a Buckskinner, I decided to reinvent myself as a Marketer. Following the advice of other very successful book marketers, I sanitized my blog, gagged and strangled my muse, and vowed to write only what would make everyone agree with me and respect me and want to read my book. My book has been out for two months, and today I'm no more of a marketer than I was when I was writing my book. I'm still the exact same writer who wrote my book, and I long to continue writing that way. I went back to my muse, purple and lying prostrate on the floor shouting, "Help! I've fallen and I can't get up!" I lifted it to its feet and asked the question I should have asked it months ago: "What do you want to write?" "Whatever I want to write," it answered. "Wow!" I said, "I had no idea! What if everyone hates us?" "It doesn't matter," my muse said. "I'm not sacrificing my voice to sell a book!" So here we are. Back!

My Election Year Resolutions

I'm making these resolutions to help me cope with my frustrations as issues surface and the dance between campaigners and the American public drags on through 2012.

1. I will stop fantasizing that all talking heads are dangling by invisible strings from the ceiling, hovering over pools of blood, with their bodies sliced off with a chain saw from the chest down in a bloody Dexter-esque scene. Instead, I'll picture the males all looking like Anthony Weiner's photo, and the females in black net stockings and garter belts.

2. I will stop imitating politicians. I'm replacing my rolling Romney chortle with my own genuine throw-headed howl that sends my hair fleeing to the four corners of the ceiling.

3. I will stop making fun of politicians' names. "Mittens" Romney is funny only to me. A newt is an aquatic amphibian similar to a salamander, called out by Shakespeare in his play, Midsummer Night's Dream: "Ye spotted snakes with double tongues, thorny hedgehogs be not seen, newts and blindworms do no wrong, come not near our fairy queen." I will not automatically say that line every time I hear Gingrich's name mentioned. And I will not make a rhyme out of Ron Paul's name: "Ron Paul will end it all." Obama does not rhyme with "Osama." It rhymes with "Oh, Mama!" And what better name for an unknown independent candidate for the Justice Party than "Rocky"! "Gonna fly now! Flyin' high now!" I'll stop wondering how high he flies, and when, and on what and with whom.

4.  Now that I don't have a uterus, I'm going to switch over to the Right-to-Lifers' side and help make abortions, miscarriages, and still-born babies criminal offenses for women. When I had a uterus, I became unintentionally pregnant more than once and had to take life-threatening measures, followed by a cover-up by influential parties. I don't need Planned Parenthood or Roe v. Wade anymore. The surgeon who removed my uterus is a baby-killer. He should go to prison, along with every mother whose baby gets sick or dies. This will have the advantage to society of creating jobs. Think of it! Private prisons springing up everywhere! And the prison population, which is now mostly black and Latino males, will become predominantly female--a more natural balance of the sexes. What woman hasn't lost a baby?

5. I will stop spending sleepless nights trying to come up with an ingenious, fail-proof scheme to free Bradley Manning and write him up in the history books as the courageous young whistleblower credited with influencing the end of the Iraq War. Instead, I will come up with a plan for avoiding my own old age and death. I need more time to do something brave and wonderful in my life!

6. I'm going to get a lobotomy so I'll be as intelligent as House Speaker Boehner and Rick Perry. I want my eyes to look sexy like theirs--creamy, glazed, confused, red, dull, and quizzical, as if to say, "What's going on?" "What does this mean?" "Where am I?" "Who are you?" "I don't have a clue."

7. I will begin preparing for the winner of the Presidential election: a gas mask and supply of oxygen if Ron Paul gets elected and abolishes all of the regulation agencies; a weapons arsenal for defending myself against the state if Newt gets elected and American citizens, including judges, are arrested and imprisoned as "terrorists"; earplugs and a sleep mask if Obama is reelected; a bomb shelter if Michele Bachmann is elected and sends us to war with Iran in defense of Israel; a stash of drugs and medical supplies to take care of my own health needs if Romney is elected and abolishes Medicare; a full, long, bushy beard growing on my face to win the admiration of Rick Perry if he's elected; a supply of Zanax to keep me calm if any of them get elected and continue to scare us all to death with claims that our country is in terrible danger of being bombed by anyone at any moment, and therefore, he or she must turn the country into a police state to "protect" us against ourselves and the terrorists among us. 

Hmm. These resolutions might not help reduce my stress. I mean, laughter is itself a stress-buster, and my fantasies make me laugh, so I'm going to have to keep them going for the talking heads. Imitating Romney's laugh also makes me laugh, as does calling Mitt "Mitten," and seeing Newt as a salamander next to spotted snakes and blindworms. I'd change my name if I were them! And getting high with Rocky? Now that's a trip to fantasize! Women are more fun to spend time with, so I don't want them all getting locked up. I can't free Bradley Manning, but it's comforting to think that a miracle could happen for him. A lobotomy to dumb me down won't be necessary--lack of sleep has the same effect! As for preparing for the eventual winner--not necessary. All I have to do is give away my four TV sets and cancel my Internet service--but that would be a last resort! 

Where Were You When. . . ?

Four of us fill the spaces on two sofas in Fred's cozy living room. I have a 37-year friendship with Fred and a 20-year friendship with Lew who sits on the sofa beside Fred and opposite the sofa where I sit next to my new friend Terry.

Lew asks why the American people always have to fight to gain their civil rights. One of us mentions Dr. Martin Luther King's peaceful demonstration and his "I Have a Dream" speech. "I WAS THERE!" Lew shouts triumphantly above our voices. Suddenly we're listening to Lew. "There were mobs of people. It had rained, and the ground was soggy and muddy. They laid planks over the mud for people to stand on," Lew says.

Lew is himself an eyewitness to history. It makes me wonder: who else do I know who was somewhere witnessing a major event in history? I've known people who were at Woodstock. How did they get there? What were the circumstances of their lives that made them want to show up there? What are their memories of that event?

Recently I recorded a man's sad personal story of child sexual abuse at the hands of his Catholic choirmaster/organist who was the good friend of the famous Cardinal Spellman in New York City.

I've heard about tribes with a tradition of oral history. Designated historians in the tribes collected the stories and retold them to the people year after year. At this time in our culture, with technology changing so quickly, I believe the spoken word preserved in various mediums won't remain accessible.

Right now, I'm searching online for a company that has the technology to record to a CD my scratchy old 1970's reel-to-reel live performance recordings of my show band. I will have to pay at least $50 for this service. Even CDs are becoming outdated, as consumers download music to iPods.

Even while books are disappearing from consumer popularity, the written word will remain, not in our computers (I've lost my hard drives countless times over the years!), not online for Kindles and Nooks, but in books and notebooks, journals, diaries. It's still important to write down the events of our lives--sure, on a computer, if typing, or even speech recognition works best for you--but then print it out and save the writing. Make copies and send them to family members and friends (very important!). You're recording history and culture in a medium that won't be lost.

My definition of "a memory" is not the whole story. A story has a beginning, middle and end. A memory is a snippet. Back in Fred's living room, I'm seeing Lew from a different perspective. As long as I've known him, I haven't known he witnessed Dr. King's speech. I want to know more about what he saw and heard that day. How did he feel being there? What was his attitude? But the group's conversation has moved on to Ghandi.

Two days after that inspiring afternoon with my friends, I'm still thinking about Lew: he was there, watching and listening to Dr. Martin Luther King! How did he come to be there? I know he was living in the D.C. area at the time, in the military, working at the Pentagon. Was he there on an intelligence assignment? Was he there out of curiosity? Did he support Dr. King's views? Did he know the breadth and scope of Dr. King's vision at that time, or did he learn about it in the years that followed? Lew's memory of the day Dr. King spoke is not the full story. There's so much more I want to know.

Now in the 60th decade of my life, what would my stories be? Where was I when. . .?  Where were you when. . .?  Who wants to know? Who cares? I do!

When I'm Dead

Simply writing for publication isn't enough anymore. The many decisions that go along with this process require knowledge of where-to's, when-to's and how-to's that one person alone can't locate and retain in memory. I'm starting to think it takes an Internet village of Webinars, web sites and blogs for writers, and social sites, along with a local group of writers who sponsor speakers, and one or more friends, whom you ideally perceive to be better writers than you, to meet with regularly for specific one-on-one feedback.

My friend Terry and I live in different towns, a 45-minute drive apart, but ever since she attended a life writers' workshop I facilitated in the spring, we have been getting together every week for lunch and information-sharing. We're both writing books. With an M.A. degree in Creative Writing and the award-winning talent to go with it, Terry is the writing partner I've been looking for. So far, we've attended a seminar together, and we're signed up for another one.

Terry suggested we get together once a week to read our writings aloud to each other, and today was the first day of our new plan. I read my work to her, and then she read it back to me. We discussed some places where I could make changes, and I heard the rightness of those changes. 

At Terry's recommendation, I'm posting one of the pieces I read to her today. (The other one, the first story for my Life with a Buckskinner book, needs polishing before it's ready for public exposure!) Jane Cooper's famous poem "Rent" is the inspiration for the tone of this piece. What would you write on this subject? 

When I'm Dead
by Renelle West

When I'm dead, I'll be gone,

completely and forever.

I won't hover over my corpse, or over the crematory

or sad friends.

I won't say a good word to God for you, 

or to Jesus, or to any prophet or angel you believe in.

I won't watch when you self-pleasure

or visit you in your dreams

or appear at the foot of your bed.

I'll leave you behind with your memories,

fantasies, mind's tricks.

All that will be left of me: my bones lying in ashes.

When I'm dead, don't feel you have to honor me--

I likely don't deserve it;

I won't be there to hear it.

You don't have to talk about my death in euphemisms.

I didn't transition, cross over, or pass away;

God didn't call me home;

I'm not with angels.

I fucking, flat-out died!

If you criticized me in life,

proclaim my faults aloud when I'm gone.

If you rolled your eyes when I spoke live words,

roll them when you remember me.

If my death reminds you of yours,

then grieve the loss of your life in your tears

before your curtain falls,

because it will.

When I'm dead,

I won't be back in any form.

No thinking or faith or belief will bring me to you.

No one living will be able to contact me in another realm.

Remember me in your truth,

But if you tell yourself lies, they will hurt only you;

I won't know.

Whatever I gave you along my life's journey
will stay with you; it's yours to keep.

I won't exist anywhere to understand you, forgive you,

or know what you were thinking

when you interacted with me.

I couldn't read your mind in life;

I won't exist to read it when I'm dead.

If we were torn apart, we should have mended our friendship

when I lived.

It will be too late when I'm gone.

My forgiveness of you after I've died is not necessary for your

continued well-being.

I won't be somewhere else feeling angry or bitter;

I won't condemn you or bury you in karma.

When I'm dead,

know that when I lived, I was conscious of and grateful for

the many gifts you gave me.

Your words and actions--trusting, generous, harsh, indifferent, loving, condemning, or compassionate--

molded my thoughts, attitudes and behavior.

I hope my relationship with you made me a better person in life, 

but that will be for you to judge, not me.

When I die, the covers of my life's book will close.

My last breath will be my last event.

This is my only life.

When I'm dead, I hope I leave behind something good in your heart,

because there won't be any more somethings.

I leave to you your triumphs and shortcomings,

your joys and sorrows and your journey forward.

They were always, only yours; never mine.

When I'm dead, I'll be gone,

Completely and forever.

Let's Write a Book!

Malcolm Gladwell is a writer for writers! His logic is rigorous, and he takes the reader beyond the obvious, into the realms under the highways of common understandings and information. Don't miss reading What the Dog Saw, his collection of outstanding articles published in Harper's.

Especially read Gladwell's Preface in which he tells how he came to choose his subjects and where he finds his stories ("You don't start out at the top if you want to find a story. You start in the middle, because it's the people in the middle who do the actual work in the world.") Be sure to read his chapter, "Late Bloomers; Why Do We Equate Genius with Precocity?" His premise is that many people are slow to develop their genius and craft, partly due to a propensity to experiment.

My way of writing songs has always been to write the lyrics first and then fit them into a melody/rhythm. Before I wrote my last recorded song, "See Him Home," some little thought in my head suggested that I first write the melody. I thought that was crazy, but the deadline for when I would have to have a song ready was a week away, and I was desperate enough to try anything. I sat down at the piano and a melody floated out of the chord changes I was playing. Next, the words fell into the spaces, words so touching and real, they surprised me and made me cry.

A few nights ago, I was thinking about what I'd like to write next, after my book Life with a Buckskinner hits the screens of the Kindle and Nook readers and the audio version is in the ears of iPod listeners. I could write a memoir about the years when I nearly died from a dark-ages abortion and the Catholic church annulled my marriage to my first husband. There's a piece of history I'm hoping our country never has to go back to! I could write a memoir about what it was like growing up in a family with a brain-injured father. That's the most common injury of war veterans these days.

I was in a quirky mood that night, and I've chewed up and choked on those old topics enough. That little backwards thought in my head started buzzing around again, suggesting that I first write the title of a story, and then fill in the story. So I wrote down a bunch of titles.

And then I got this freaky idea to let others write chapters for these books. They'll be collective works, written by a number of people instead of just one. Each chapter has to stand on its own with a beginning, middle and end. There won't be any money for the contributors--it takes some capital and editor's time to get an e-book out, and most books sell fewer than 100 downloads, for a pittance--but there will be plenty of notoriety to go around!

It doesn't matter if your chapter is fact or fiction, serious, funny, long, or short (a few hundred words). Write whatever and however much you want to write. The only limitations are that your chapter can't have any "explicit" sexual material in it, and it needs to somehow fit with the book title. Include made-up or real-life stories in your chapter, to provide a balance of showing and telling.

If you're interested, do this:

1. Friend me on Facebook, if you're not already on my Facebook page.
2. Send me a message telling me which book(s) you'd like to write a chapter for. I'll give you my email address.
3. Write the chapter; make sure your name is on it and which book you're writing the chapter for.
4. Attach the chapter to an email.

I'll start as many of the books as I get contributors for. I'll publish a book when the word count gets up to 40,000-50,000 words, the size of a novel. If you know anyone who would be interested, send them this blog link.

Renelle's Facebook Page

Here are the book titles:

• How To Be Something You're Not
• A Perfectionist's Descent into Mediocrity
• How I Quit Smoking and Everything Else
• Surviving the Presidential Election; When Moving to Another Country Isn't an Option
• Confessions of a Non-Bloomer
• Can I Do Anything About This? Plus 200 (or however many we get) More Decision-Guiding Questions to Ask Yourself  (each question has to be explained for its importance, with examples of how/when to ask the question--again, humorous, serious--your call.)

I'd love to see one or more of these titles out there entertaining people, wouldn't you?

Deep Within My Heart Lies Imagery

"Writing is the axe that breaks the frozen sea within us."  --Franz Kafka 

As writers, we need to be developing high standards through reading the writings of authors with high standards. The problem is that when you know you have a good story to write, you're also likely to be sure that you won't be able to write it in a way that would meet your high standards. And maybe your assessment of your abilities is correct--your writing won't meet your standards--for two possible reasons: you haven't written enough to hone your craft and style, or you've honed your craft and style, but because it's totally yours, it doesn't look like any other writer's work, and you lack confidence in your unique creations.

Whatever the reason, getting down the first sentence might feel like Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the hill when he knows that each time he gets it to the top, it's going to roll down. Why struggle to get your words onto the page when you already know they won't measure up to your expectations, or anyone else's?

Before you walk away from the computer again (!), before you lay down your pen and turn your back on the blank paper lying on the table again (!), visualize the events of your story and ask yourself this question:

What images do I see, hear, smell, taste, and feel (touch) when I remember the events of my story?

Now you're ready to begin describing one of the images. You might hear your father saying certain things and your spoken responses. You might see the rotting porch of your childhood home, with elongated black spaces where planks were missing. You might smell the cinnamon in the gingerbread cookies your mother baked before Christmas. You might feel your dog's scaly nose and the wet lap of her tongue sliding up the side of your cheek. With these descriptions you are showing the reader what you want him or her to experience through imagination.

In a recent letter to me, James, a prisoner in a state correctional institution, describes prisoners as "T. rex's in a phone booth."

Songwriters use imagery in lyrics like these:

"Deep within my heart lies a melody, a song of old San Anton."

"Strolling with my girlie when the dew is pearly early in the morning.
Butterflies all flutter up and kiss each little buttercup at dawning."

"Stars shining bright above you.
 Night breezes seem to whisper I love you.
Birds singing in the sycamore tree.
Dream a little dream of me."

These lyrics are from my "Cake Song" on the most frequently-downloaded track from my Spiritland album:

"Sunny cake, funny cake, hearty cake, party cake,
Wishy cake, squishy cake, fatty cake, patty cake.
. . . icky, sticky, mucky, yucky, gooey, chewy, yummy tummy."

Here's my first paragraph of Chapter 1 in my book, Life with a Buckskinner, to be published soon:

"When I remember Whitey, I hear his rolling laughter. The first time was over the phone on a summer evening in my father’s home in Canton, Ohio, in 1973. I was standing in my stepmother’s shoebox-sized income tax office when I dialed the number shown in the Canton Repository want-ad for a “female singer with a working lounge trio.” The stranger who answered the phone was Whitey. I told him I was calling about his ad. I had a high singing voice; I could play a clarinet, a ukulele, and some piano; and I wasn’t young—I was 29 years old. He laughed and then in a voice resonant with kind smiles, said, “We’re not teeny boppers, either!” He was right. He was 35, and we couldn’t have known it then, but he’d already lived more than half of his life."

The above paragraph includes sensory images and a foreshadowing.

Here is my partial description of my first night on stage with Whitey's band. I contrast the location of the stage in that lounge with the location of stages in other night clubs where I've performed.

"The best thing about this room was the small stage rising up in front of everyone, in full view of every seat in the room. My place on the stage was out in front of the band, and Whitey had taught me in rehearsals to never turn around, no matter what happens in the band behind me. Onstage that first night, I might as well have been standing all alone in the bright lights at the end of a fashion show runway. I was so terrified, I forgot I was supposed to sing and faded off several times during the first song, “Girl from Epanema.” “Sing!” I could hear Whitey shouting over the music.

Having a stage out in front of everyone was, and still is, unusual for small night clubs. We had an inside joke in our band that the bandstand area is an owner’s afterthought. I’ve performed facing a wall; in front of the bathroom doors; looking at the backs of people facing the opposite direction; next to a popcorn machine spewing black noxious smoke; in front of an elevated TV set showing sports events that everyone was watching; beside a giant moose head (or some hairy dead animal with horns); between the dining room and the lounge, so the diners spent the evening looking at our backsides, and several times a night, some brazen woman on the dining room side would grab the drummer around the waist from behind, threatening to pull him off the stage backwards; up at the end of a huge empty dance floor where the people beyond it looked like slow-moving bedbugs; and on a rotating stage in the center of a huge convention-sized lounge. The last room was in a Holiday Inn in Michigan. On week nights, a few people crowded next to the bar, and the rest of the room was empty; still our band went round and round like a mechanical band on a merry go round, playing to an empty room through three quarters of each revolution. When we asked the manager to stop the stage from turning, she made the stage revolve faster until my head felt like it was going to drop off onto the floor and my stomach threatened to spill its contents.

The most memorable places my band, and later I, played were in rooms where the stage faced a flight of carpeted steps leading down from an upper entrance level. At the Holiday Inn in Bismarck, North Dakota, we giggled through our songs as customers slid down the stairs on their butts or tripped and bounced to the bottom, striking comical poses on the way down."

It's good practice and fun to write words that paint a picture of sensory images. Think of one image from an event in your life that you'd like to describe, and try these steps to see if they work for you:

1. Write a simple description in sentences or phrases.
2. Flesh out the images by replacing "be" verbs with colorful action verbs
3. Add specific adjectives to describe nouns, and if the adjective requires comparison (tall, big, little, long, short, etc.), either compare the object you're describing to something else to show the size or duration, or use a specific noun or adjective
4. Replace cliches with your figures of speech you make up
5. Keep working with the words to refine the picture until it comes into focus as your original piece of artwork

In the Comments section, give us your secrets for writing images and sensory descriptions. Would you add any steps to the ones above?  I'd love to read your descriptive passages and ideas showing images! Please share your ideas with us. If you've never published, posting your writing here is a healthy beginning.








 

Shhh! Very Busy Learning!

I haven't learned this much since my Western Civilization course in college! Every day I see a term or initials that stand for something I don't know anything about, and I'm off on another rabbit romp into a summer Iowa cornfield. At least these days with the Internet, I find information with a few clicks compared to the "olden days" in college when I stacked my room with library books to write one 5-page research paper. You have to be at least as old as I am to fully appreciate this instant access to everything in the world!

For instance, do you know what DRM stands for? I didn't until I read a blog comment John Locke made to a writer who had e-books published on Kindle. He wrote that to get the DRM off her books--they're annoying to readers and don't protect copyrights anyway--she would have to change her titles and resubmit her books.

Until today I didn't even know who John Locke was. The presenter, author Jane Friedman, at the publishing webinar I watched on Thursday, mentioned his name. She also named Amanda Hocking and J.A. Konrath.

Amanda Hocking is a best-selling Kindle e-book writer, who is gifted with an unusual, delightful creativity. You can see for yourself on her blog here:
Amanda Hocking

Based on everything I've been learning, here's what I suggest: if you're a writer, write, publish, and market. If you're a writer, you're writing because it's something you do, like breathing. Writers write in every cranny-space of time and place. We can't help it. If you know how to do something, write a book that tells how. If you love reading fiction, make up a story.

Long before you finish writing your book, you have to begin creating and implementing a marketing plan. Search online for the place where the readers hang out who would read your book. Start your own blog, create a website, and learn how to use Twitter and Facebook to connect with people who would read your book. Your book can cost readers as little as $.99 to download from Amazon. Amazon pays the author $.35 for each $.99 download.

When the book is finished, send it off to an editor for editing and proofreading. If you have Power Point, you can create your own cover and save it as a JPEG file. Be sure you learn the elements that make a good book cover! (Hint: the title and your name have to be really BIG!)

For $99 you can send your book off to Book Baby to have them format it for e-readers and distribute it to all of the e-book outlets. 

All this time, in between writing your book, you'll still be doing what you love--writing on your blog and everywhere else where you can get to know potential readers.

Here's what I learned today--you probably already know it--DRM stands for Digital Rights Management. I believe it's on software CDs for Microsoft Word and other programs you buy. I've been running into it on iTunes, and now with my brief affiliation with Audible Manager (a subsidiary of Amazon that sells audio books). These huge companies have software that monitors your computer use and shuts you down to keep you from making copies of a product you downloaded from them.

Authors in the webinars tell us that someone pirating one of our books shouldn't be a concern. Jane Friedman addressed the battle to get attention all writers are engaged in and wrote, "Obscurity is a greater threat than piracy."

And now I learn from reading John Locke's comment that I shouldn't allow Kindle to use that "protection" on my books when I publish them. Here is a company I found online that is taking on and fighting against the use of DRM software:
Defective by Design

So now who is John Locke? By now, maybe you've already googled him and found out he's the first independent, self-published author to sell a million e-book downloads on Kindle, and he did it in 5 months. He's much more than that, or he couldn't have done what he did. He's a marketer, a lovable, sweet man who joyfully answers every single reader who writes to him and happily answers every blogger on any blog site where he writes. He also reads other independent authors' books and generously praises their work and supports them on their blogs. He has the online joyful larger-than-life presence of a Bill Clinton. I wonder if he's the extravert in his real life that he is online. It's hard to imagine how he would get so much done if he were.

Here's his website where you can download his book that tells you how to do what he did to market his e-book online and sell a million copies:
John Locke's Website

This is J.A. Konrath's website. He writes thrillers and lives in a suburb of Chicago, for my Chicago-suburb readers. Who knows? He might be your next door neighbor!
J.A. Konrath's Website

Numbers show value, and over a million readers read Konrath's blog, "A Newbie's Guide to Publishing." He interviewed John Locke as a guest, and afterwards more than 100 writers wrote questions for John, which he answered. I learned heaps about publishing and marketing from reading the interview and all of the comments. Jane Friedman mentioned Konrath's blog in her webinar presentation as a valuable source of information for publishing.

I can't finish this post without mentioning how this information I've learned has caused me to change my mind about my own writing project, Life with a Buckskinner.

To repeat what I've already written in other posts, the book is primarily a collection of my humorous stories published in the Muzzleloader magazine in the early 1980's. My husband was the talented leader/jazz musician/arranger of a Las Vegas-style showband on the road in the 1970's-80's, and I also sang and played instruments in the band. We'd been out less than a year when he decided to take up mountain man reenactment as a side distraction from our stressful life. We were a team, so wherever the van went, there went I! Since I had no interest in guns or camping, my life style of performing at night and sleeping during the day worked well for me during our first few years at rendezvous. Gradually, I started staying awake longer and decided I might as well bloom where I was planted. I became known as the "Erma Bombeck of Muzzleloading."

Initially I was going to write an introduction telling how Whitey and I got together, went on the road, and ended up in a lean-to at rendezvous. I was also going to write a short afterword about us, and then self-publish the e-book and audiobook.

Then a few weeks ago I started thinking about what an interesting period of musical history our story would be, juxtapositioned with that buckskinner life. Based on that idea, I decided to flesh out the musician story and include the published stories in a section in the back. And, of course, my stories of the road would be so delicious to read, I would have no trouble finding a traditional publisher for my book! I have time to wait for the year or so it takes for a traditional company to publish my book--so I thought!

Today, based on John Locke's encouraging words, I've changed my mind again and returned to my original plan. I want this little 100-page book to come out soon, not years from now. Here is my plan of action:

• Write a beginning and end chapter to tie the stories together. 
• Stay with a $.99 pricing plan for Kindle books.
• Put a marketing plan in place to find and hang out where my readers for this book are congregating and use social media to stay in touch with them. 
• Have cover designer Becky Fox finish the covers and upload them when I retain the publishing services.
• Finish recording another 4 stories. 
• Have Bo, a world-class fiddle player who happens to live in my town, record some original fiddle 4-bar ditties for the beginnings and endings of the stories.
• Send my beginning and ending chapters to a friend who will edit/proofread them for a fee. (Yes! Writers need editers!) 
• Buy a block of ISBN numbers for selling the books ($250 for a block of 10)  

Purchase ISBN numbers

• Submit the e-book to Book Baby for formatting and distributing
• Submit the audiobook to CD Baby for distribution to all of the online places. 
• Order short runs of printed books and audiobooks for signings at book fairs. (I will not publish this book through a subsidy publisher such as i-Universe. I'll share printing information with you in another post.)

From everything I've learned, writing and publishing a book without marketing it is like singing in the shower. Only you will know what your voice sounds like and the song you're singing!

Does writing, publishing and marketing sound like something you would like to do? If so, I've learned that a dreamer usually comes outfitted with the talent and ability to accomplish the dream. Honing the craft of your talent is hard work. But in the end-phase of getting it all out the door, you can read and follow the directions of those who have succeeded and are willing to share their knowledge. They're sharing information everywhere. I hope you're okay being a life-long learner!

Check out my new toon! I started wondering what a combined show of "Ice Road Truckers" and "Swamp Loggers" might look like and....

How to Write a Great Story--Don't!

When people learn that I have facilitated life writers' groups and edited life stories for authors, they often tell me they have great stories and ask me if I would write their stories for them. In my younger years, when I believed I would live a lifetime that would last into eternity, I consented to the hours of painstaking listening required to glean from the client those hundreds of tiny sensory details that make a story rich and real, and I spent unpaid months putting the story together in a way that fulfilled the client's expectations.

You already have at least one, and maybe dozens of great unwritten stories waiting their turn to adorn the pages of a book. In this context, you know that the abstract adjective great that appears in the title means that your life events and experiences are interesting, unique, and even unbelievable, and you know that everyone else would agree with you, if you could only write your stories down. 

It's the second use of the word great in the title that I want to address in this post. "Write a great story"  implies a finished written piece that meets not only the expectations of your inner critic but the high standard of quality literature that a book publisher or magazine editor would demand before consenting to publish it. And, of course, you have to give your readers a great read! That concept has choked my recent writing attempts and made me wonder if fear of failure to reach my expectations is the main culprit that spawns the dreaded writer's block in other writers, too.

This morning I started again to write down my great story of my years as a singer with a band on the road. It will accompany my collection of already-published-and-deemed-worthy humorous stories of my life (on that same road) with my husband. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't meet my expectations for writing this story in a great way.

You see, I care about the final written version of this story, in the same way I cared about becoming a great nightclub singer. That had been my dream ever since 5th grade when I saw the movie, Pete Kelly's Blues in Dover, Delaware, when I watched Peggy Lee bulging out of her slinky black dress, leaning against the piano in an  inebriated glaze-eyed swoon, singing the blues, or rather, slurring the blues. I wanted to be a singer like her.

I was already 28 years old when I finally won the audition to sing with a working lounge trio in Akron, Ohio. I had three weeks to not only learn 28 songs, but to completely change from my operatic style of singing in my lyric soprano head voice to a pop style of singing in my chest voice. I'd never sung in that voice before, but the leader of the band (who later became my husband) had helped two other operatic females morph into pop singers and knew he could teach me, too.

In the first two weeks, my chest voice sounded thin and weak and truthfully terrible. I couldn't hit high notes without going into my operatic head voice, and in those years of pop music, that was unacceptable. I was certain I would fail in achieving the end result of ever being a great singer. After all, I already knew what great female pop singers sounded like: Diana Ross, Dolly Parton, Karen Carpenter, Barbra Streisand, and Olivia Newton-John.

In hindsight, in those early beginnings of my music career, what I didn't and couldn't know--and this is key to our discussion of writing a great story--was how I would sound as a great singer. I could not then know the meaning of the word great as it pertained to my vocal abilities yet to be developed. My inner critic was incapable of judging my potential and my performance, because it didn't have a defined standard for me. I had to stop criticizing myself and crying (!) before I could embark on the learner's journey of finding my voice.

By now, you've probably guessed where this discussion is going. I called my creative partner Terry this morning and told her about my failed attempts to write. She told me she was having the same doubts and fears about her ability to get her stories written. She said that I was shutting down my creative process by my stubborn insistence of being critic and editor before I could write down the first sentence.

Her solution was simple. We both have to let go of our preconceived expectations and outcomes. Specifically, I must take off the editing, critic, and English teacher hats and simply write the images, feelings, and sensory descriptions within the events--like Julia Cameron's "morning pages," like the way I tell other writers to write, like the way my song lyrics pour out all over the page before I know their rhythms and melodies. As always, I will write with pen on paper. Terry writes with a pencil because she loves the smell of lead dust. Writing by hand forces my thinking to slow down and breathe.

When fear of failure prevails, letting go of control is counter-intuitive but necessary if we're going to be writers. This word great, as in "writing a great story," must remain an abstract word, always reminding me that I won't have a vision of a final outcome or meaning for that word, ever. There is a point in the process when I will my put on my organizer/assembler's hat and try to make sense out of those scribbled words, but the initial flow-out has to be unfettered by judgment. 

I don't know what the final story will look like, and that's okay. It will have its own rhythm and style, its own expression, its own arrangement of words on the page, its own voice. The process and the outcome will surprise me. They always do!

Help for Writing Your Stories

Good news for writers: there is power in the written word. Whether you want to teach others what you have learned through experience, help bring about awareness and change, record what will become history, or bring fictional characters to life, the goal is to share your ideas with readers.

I italicized “readers” because unless you find readers to read what you’ve written you won’t accomplish any of the reasons why you write. Besides, writing something that will have a permanent home among the dust clumps under the bed isn’t as much fun as writing with the anticipation that someone else will read it and love it.

This past week I’ve been busting out in a “writer’s spring”—the upheaval of turning in new directions and making new decisions. Now, having written the content for my new web site and revamping and redirecting this blog, I’m finally ready to begin sharing with you what I’ve been learning about writing, marketing, and publishing.

I'll still write stories from my life, past and present, which I hope will give you writing ideas. Also, on each blog post, I'll include "Writer's Block," a block of stuff about writing, a block of a small-town village street on a summer night where you sit on your front porch steps and think about things, a section designed to enthuse your muse, maybe even compel you to step away from the demands of your life and write. The Writer's Block might include one or more of the following:

• A brief review of a book relevant to writing
• A writer’s how-to segment, which could be an English lesson, suggestions for finding time to write, information about marketing or publishing, or ideas for making your writing life more fun
• Quotes from other writers
• Questions based on my life story segment to help you think about your story
• A suggested writing assignment

So here we go!

Writer’s Block

Ya Gotta Love That Voice!
A pox on truth-tellers if they can’t launch their stories into sunny skies! Really! Mark Twain and British poet-novelist Philip Larkin would be labeled “negative,” if not downright whiney in today’s society. To me, their voices are refreshing, a touch of authentic human angst, offering the gift of catharsis in this cultural wilderness of spin.

In 1898, Mark Twain wrote in his autobiography about his maid, “[She] has a high-keyed voice and a loud one. . . .talks all the time, talks in her sleep, will talk when she’s dead. . .and is consumingly interested in every devilish thing that is going on. Particularly if it is not her affair."

British poet-novelist Philip Larkin wrote, "I think writing about unhappiness is probably the source of my popularity, if I have any--after all most people are unhappy, don't you think? He also wrote, "Until I grew up I thought I hated everybody, but when I grew up, I realized it was just children I didn't like.

After graduating from Oxford, Larkin worked as a librarian for the rest of his life. About his career, Larkin wrote, "I have never felt anything but degraded as the librarian in this hole of toad's turds," and "I am entirely unassisted in my labors and spend most of my time handing out tripey novels to morons."

Why Not Write and Publish an E-book?

Writer’s Digest sponsors excellent Webinars. On Thursday, August 11, 1-2:30 p.m. you can learn about publishing an e-book. The cost is $79. Learn more about it and register at this site. You can also order a download or DVD of this webinar from the Writer’s Digest Shop:
Writer's Digest Shop

Suggested Writing Assignment
Making a plan to write is as important as writing. Start a list of writing ideas of events and experiences in your life that were unique to a period of history you lived through, or activities/events you participated in that few others would know about. A list makes writing irresistible!

Here's my short list:

• Graduate student in the 60’s counterculture revolution
• Getting high with Timothy Leary
• Getting high with Jim Varney (Ernest)
• Getting high with. . . .no. No more  : )
• Singer/musician with a Las Vegas-style showband on the road for eight years
• Life with my husband who became a “Buckskinner.”
• First runner-up to Miss Kentucky and how I found out the pageants were fixed.
• When the Catholic church annulled my marriage

Happy writing! Let me hear from you!

Rescue from Writer's Mud Hole

Accomplishments seemed to come more easily for me when I was young. As a writer in corporate marketing and technology fields, I went to an office every day for a decade and wrote with purpose and focus, always thankful for my creative muse who never let me down. After all, the audience was well-defined, the content was focused, the tone and writing style were already determined, and the rules were established. All I had to do was write all day into the night and on weekends and holidays until I was burned out.  

Nowadays, slogging through my own first writing project, Life with a Buckskinner, I've been unwilling to admit that I'm stuck and can't get myself out. That is, until I woke up this morning and had the first honest conversation with myself about why I haven't written the introductory chapter. That is, until I admitted to myself that I need to ask someone for help. That is, until my friend Terry Hess arrived today for our usual Tuesday lunch and I asked her to have the conversation with me.

Terry is in my life at the perfect right time. She has a master's degree in creative writing and has won awards for her stories. Reading her stories reminds me that we all have remarkable life experiences that would make great stories, if only we could write them with a mastery of the craft of writing combined with the grace and beauty of an artist. Terry has a wrenching life story and a rare talent of writing prose like poetry--sentences that gently rock you, while gathering you up into a storm until you suddenly break open into a wound of blood and tears. She is my example and mentor.

Fortunately, she has read my already-published stories that I will include in my book, and after a few minutes of back and forth with her, I wasn't stuck anymore. The answers were clear. And you know what? It was the way I had originally planned for the book to go, with an introductory chapter and an ending chapter. I'd been second-guessing myself and lost my way. But I still would have needed the conversation with Terry. My idea needed enhancement, with even more direction and focus. Suddenly, writing looks like fun again--at least after I've had an early-evening nap to renew my energy. 

Today I promise to admit it to myself as soon as I get stuck again and to ask for help immediately. With my life sliding on a downhill slope, I don't have time to lie to myself that I can, by myself, think my way out of a writer's mud hole. I'll look for the outer signs: procrastination, confusion, and indecisiveness.

If you're expressing yourself in a creative life, I hope you have one or more creative partners who believe in you, who have experience and skills that complement your skills, and who inspire and challenge you to rise to your highest and best.

Life with My Parrots

Besides the scratching, scurrying critters living inside the walls of my house and the little bugs flying up my nose and crawling around on the ceilings, I live with two other critters. It is my sole responsibility to keep them alive, and I do this by feeding and giving them water daily, buying food at the grocery store weekly and at the pet store monthly, and watching them for signs that they're getting sick or bleeding to death. Most days, we all talk and sing to each other; we dance together, usually, but not always, to music; and periodically I video them and take photographs of them.

Yes, they're parrots. Carmen, my female African Gray will be 19 years old in November this year--somewhat young for an African Grey that could live 60 years, and Pookie, my male cockatiel, will be 18 years old--very very old for a cockatiel!

My boyfriend Lew bought Carmen when I lived with him. She was 7 weeks old, half-grown. For several years I walked around with her standing on my shoulder drinking apple juice from a paper cup. After I moved away from Lew, he would sometimes let me take care of her when he went out of town on business trips. Lew never wanted me to teach her anything. Once while I had her, I taught her to howl like Wolf Man Jack ("OUWOOOOO Wolf Man Jack!"). A month after he returned and retrieved Carmen he said to me at work one day, "Oh by the way, what did you do to my bird?"
"What's the matter with her?" I asked.
"Nothing, but she howls like Wolf Man Jack!"

Pookie

 After I moved into my own apartment, I bought Pookie. My friend who raised birds went with me. We stood outside the pet store looking at the hanging cage full of baby cockatiels. "One of them will choose you," my friend said. None of them chose me. I had to grab a screaming Pookie and pull him out.

In 1996 Lew was preparing for his assignment in Malaysia and I was hired as a technical writer in a company up near Milwaukee and preparing to move. He couldn't take Carmen with him, but didn't want to give her to me, either, probably because I told him that once he gave her to me, I wasn't giving her back.

Pookie and I went on to Milwaukee, then to Ohio. Lew put Carmen into a bird-sitting home where she spent 1-1/2 years standing on the man's shoulder throughout the day. Lew and I both ended up back in the same Florida town at the same time. Lew had to leave town again and asked me to take care of Carmen, but he wasn't ready to let me have her for good. I hadn't seen her since leaving for Wisconsin. For me, it was a joyful reunion. For her--well, she sat in her cage burping loud rolling belches all the way home. That bird-sitting man she loved so much must have had a serious digestion problem. How many times since then I've had to explain to someone that Carmen must have indigestion, knowing full well birds don't burp, they imitate people burping! I didn't want anyone to think I burped like that.

Lew never came to pick Carmen up when he came back to town, and eventually he gave her to me for good, in exchange for my keyboard and the promise that I would teach him to play it. I had no hope for him--he couldn't even carry a tune with his voice, but he knew something about himself that I didn't know. Today he plays keyboard like a musician! The exchange was beneficial for all of us.

African Grays are supposed to have the intelligence of a 5-year-old child. I'm convinced Carmen wants me to believe she's retarded. When I first brought her home with me after her year in the bird-sitting home, she spoke in full sentences in the mornings, before she knew I was awake. She used to say, "You are sooo beeeyooteeeful," when I would hold her against my body and stroke the feathers on her head backwards. She used to help me call the dog in from the backyard with a man's whistle and a loud gutteral "HEY!" in a man's voice. And she used to say, "OH MY GOD!" Now she sings and says "WOW" and a few token words and phrases to let me know she knows what's going on. 

Parrots don't smile or have any facial expressions, and when they talk, you have to look closely to see their beaks move. 

Carmen in Ohio, 200

One night around midnight I went outside to see where the far-away crows were. I didn't know crows called at night. All was quiet. Turns out the far-away crows were inside, namely Carmen. Another night I heard a loud repeated runny-nose sniffing, like someone with a bad cold, and ran from window to window to see who might be breaking into my apartment. It was Carmen. That was the first I realized I was constantly snuffling from allergies. 

Life with Carmen has not been easy for either of us. She's tried to kill me a few times when I had the telephone in my hand. Once I screamed a werewolf movie scream into the phone when I answered the call of a man who wanted to hire me as a writer for his company. I had to hang up and clean up the blood from eight bites on both hands and down my neck and back before I called the man back and got the job. Guess he felt sorry for me, or for himself, as he had to have lost his hearing over that episode. Now I never answer the phone when she's out of the cage. She's bitten me hard enough a few times to make me seriously consider popping her in the microwave and eating her for dinner.

She's had two major surgeries on the end of her back, which nearly put all four of us (both birds, my rottie and me) out on the street. I thought she would die both times and required long hospitalizations. 

Carmen After First Surgery

Before both surgeries, she looked ready for the stewpot, having pulled out most of her feathers. She was fully feathered again until February of this year when my rottie Savannah died and she started pulling out feathers again. I think she misses Savannah always sitting in front of her cage staring at her, waiting for her to throw out bird pellets to her. Lew says Carmen needs therapy. I call her a "lyric soprano bare-chested feather-picker." 

Bare-chested feather-picker

Even though Pookie is the cutest, smartest bird I've ever known, I'm the only one who knows it. He won't sing any of his songs if someone else besides me is in the room. He and I are in a segment on "Planet's Funniest Animals." It took me three months to video it by myself. While he sits on my shoulder, I say, "Pookie, how does the rooster go?" He looks at me, then bows his head down low, raises it up high and goes, "er  er-er  er-errrr." So cute! 

Pookie taught Carmen to play peek-a-boo, and they used to play it together with each other when I wasn't in the room. Pookie isn't safe around Carmen. Once when he landed on her cage, she bloodied his feet, and another time she tried to kill Pookie when they were both sitting on different levels of a perch.

Life with birds doesn't give the same return of affection that a dog gives. Still, my parrots give me the opportunity to take care of lives besides my own, and the illusion that another human is in the house speaking in what sounds like my voice coming through a megaphone: "Wanna take a bath?" "Apple." "Carmeeena!---What!" "WOW!" And Pookie's "Eye-Eye. Eee ooo waiter" when I'm leaving the house. He can't pronounce syllables.

As I write this just before 1 a.m., an owl calls in its deep-throated voice outside my window in the live oak tree. If Carmen were in this room, she'd wake me up with owl calls in the morning. 

I found this accurate description online of the struggle to give a bird medicine through a syringe--been there, done that!

HOW TO MEDICATE A BIRD: (author unknown)

Occasionally, we find it necessary to medicate our feathered friends. Here are some pointers to help you with this task.

FIRST APPLICATION:
Retrieve the bird from the cage.
Set the bird on a table and hold its head by carefully grasping the neck where it joins the lower jaw, or mandible.
With your other hand, grasp the medicine syringe and place the tip into the left side of the bird’s mouth.
Depress the plunger and squirt the medicine toward the back of the bird’s throat.
Wipe excess medicine from the bird’s beak.
Place the bird back in the cage.

SUBSEQUENT APPLICATIONS:
Attempt to retrieve the bird from the cage.
Apply bandages as necessary to wounds on your hands and arms.
Retrieve the bird from its new hiding place under the coffee table.
Carefully immobilize the bird’s head to prevent further tissue damage to your body.
Attempt to break the “Vulcan Death Grip” and remove the bird’s feet from your hand.
Apply more bandages and a strong analgesic cream to the new wounds on your hands and arms.
Immobilize the bird by carefully wrapping it in a bath towel.
Watch in amazement as the bird “morphs.” Its head and tail will probably swap position,
putting your tender flesh in mortal danger again.
Hold the bird snugly in its terrycloth prison.
Grasp the medicine syringe.
Try to stop trembling in fear and pain.
Place the tip of the syringe into the left side of the bird’s mouth.
Ignore the crushed tip.
Depress the plunger and squirt the medicine toward the back of the bird’s throat.
Wipe excess medicine out of your eyes.
Release the bird and squirt medicine in the general vicinity of its face.
 Some medicine may actually go into the mouth.
The rest will be absorbed by osmosis.
 
Shoo the bird back to the cage.

 Spend the rest of the day attempting to regain the bird’s affection with yummy snacks and new toys.

When the Bough Broke

My mother didn't know that when she sang "Rock-a-bye Baby" to help me settle down at bedtime every night she was terrifying me:

Rock-a-bye baby in the treetops
When the wind blows the cradle will rock
When the bough breaks the cradle will fall
And down will come baby, cradle and all.

All I could picture was the baby in the cradle falling, and I knew first-hand the painful consequences of falling.

Last Sunday morning I awoke and realized that sometime during that night of restless sleep, the bough had broken and my cradle was falling. In this very dark place, I wrote,

"Walking into this dark tunnel of disease is taking more courage than I have. I've grown skittish over the past few years. I wear the arched, standing-up furred back of a cat that knows it's in danger. Even getting ready for a music gig feels dangerous now.

In a few days I'll bleed into a needle in preparation for my 6-month appointment with the oncologist. I expect him to tell me coldly that my lymphocyte count has multiplied, but I'm still in the "wait and watch" Stage 0 of CLL (leukemia). Night sweats, the thrush (yeast infection in my mouth), and extreme fatigue are the only symptoms right now, and still I'm peering into the unknown darkness wondering what's next. It can't be good.

Even as I go alone into the unknown of this disease, I know I'm in lockstep with a billion others on this planet who have begun their own descent, with no choice of turning back to a younger, healthier life." 

This was the Sunday I was scheduled to provide the music for Rev. Ron Fox's Center for Spiritual Living (CSL) 10 a.m. service. Trying to decide on which music to play to fit Rev. Ron's "Remaking Ourselves" topic had given me a week-long angst. I'd made the selections and practiced them through the week, but on Saturday night, I was certain the songs were the wrong choices. I spent hours going through each piece of music in four file drawers, finally deciding on a new set, and then feeling the panic that happens when I know I might not have time to adequately prepare.

On this Sunday morning, I knew that I was broken, falling helplessly like the baby in the cradle beneath blankets of issues. I had to leave my house at 8:20 a.m. to arrive at the church by 9 a.m. My mind/body doesn't obey my commands at that early hour, and singing with a tired voice is always a struggle, if not a disaster. And who wants to hear the performance of an inspirational singer who lacks inspiration? Another blanket covered the rest: the strange dilemma of ministering to a congregation through music in a church, when I can no longer, in my truth, subscribe to a belief of the existence of an invisible deity "God," and certainly not to the concept of God healing me. And now I was smothering in the thickest of all blankets--the fear for my unknown future. My integrity cradle was on the way down, with a cowardly me buried under the blankets.

I thought about calling Rev. Ron and telling him I was sick and couldn't make it. Then I thought about the disaster for a minister of having to conduct a church service without music. I arrived on time, dressed and fronting a belying smile. Rev. Ron's talk was about living life and our ability to focus and change direction. I sang the songs I'd prepared about living life. One was David Beede's song titled "Trite Secrets," the story of an old woman in the park who always sang this:

"Play like a child in the park,
Sing like no one can hear,
Sleep like you're never afraid of the dark,
Wake like there's nothing to fear
Dance like no one is lookin'
Love like you never cried,
Eat like it's always home cookin'
Work like your dreams never died"

Rev. Ron's talk was lush with encouragement for focusing and making changes in ourselves, along with quoted passages from many of my favorite authors. Afterwards (thanks to the freedom of song selections in New-Thought churches), I sang a medley of Broadway show songs in which two women make commitments to change their lives: "I Ain't Down Yet" from The Unsinkable Molly Brown and "Before the Parade Passes By" from Hello Dolly. I had a new understanding of the words as I sang them: "When the whistle blows and the cymbals crash and the sparklers light the sky, I'm gonna raise the roof! I'm gonna carry on! Give me an old trombone, give me and old baton, before the parade passes by."

The combination of Rev. Fox's talk, the music I'd chosen to sing, and the loving reception of the people there restored me to a new awareness of that balance of living the life I have while preparing for the eventuality of what is ahead.

Sunday afternoon was wonderful. I went online to the CLL support groups my sister had bookmarked for me, to try to find out what's next for this disease and found out that what's next is, as one patient expressed it, "accepting CLL and sleeping at night and not being sad, angry, afraid. Stress makes the WBC go up." Another one wrote, "I appreciate everything and everyone around me." Another one wrote, "I thank God for each day and all that it brings, good or bad." They wrote about the importance of getting exercise, eating healthy foods, having fun, and keeping up immunizations for pneumonia and flu. My doctor gave me those shots last week. Yes! Yes! Wait for me! I'm getting there! 

I was up all Sunday night, pulling out and packing up everything I don't need from all the closets, drawers, and storage areas in my house while the song played over and over in my mind "To everything (turn, turn, turn). . . .There is a season (turn, turn, turn) And a time to every purpose under the heaven. A time to be born and a time to die. . . ."  On Monday morning, by 9 a.m., my driveway was stacked four rows thick with piles of stuff that had been oppressing me, and at 1 p.m., the AMVETS truck arrived to carry it all away, minus some items the neighbors had already taken.

My storage area in the shed is neatly stacked with empty plastic file boxes and bins with lids for the day when someone will come in and pack up everything valuable. I have a new Will and Living Will, and every other important document resides in a thick black 3-ring binder with instructions and the address and phone number of the great paralegal firm here in town who can make everything happen for fraction of the cost of an attorney.

The baby is warm in the gently rocking cradle. The landing was soft. The lullaby has an ongoing happy ending: when the bough breaks, the cradle catches on a lower, stronger branch. I have plenty of time left to live a happy life in the comfort of truth and balance.  

Another One Walks Free

Casey Anthony's trial has kept many otherwise productive Americans catatonic in front of their TV screens, hoping to learn in the proceedings how Casey's little girl died and who was responsible for her death.

This whole saga reminds me of my conversations with my father after he raped my retarded, autistic stepsister Denise (in her early twenties) five nights in a row. He was home alone with her while my stepmother was in the hospital undergoing tests for spots on her lungs. 

After several months of bizarre behavior, including an attempt to choke another student in the vocational school she was attending, Denise, who could not speak coherently, finally acted out the ugly scenes for her mother. The evidence was in underwear on the floor of Denise's closet and in her erratic, violent behavior, and in the sentences in my father's daily journal on those days, in his handwriting.

I carry the blame for what happened to her. My husband Whitey and I, musicians on the road with our Vegas-style showband, happened to have that week off in between bookings and had come back to Canton to see our families. I knew my stepmother was in the hospital. I knew my brain-injured father, lacking impulse control, was alone in his house with Denise. A strong inner voice told me that Whitey and I should be staying there with them. Instead, we stayed in a nearby motel. 

Every day my father drove Denise, Whitey and me to the hospital to visit my stepmother. I noticed Denise walking in a way she'd never walked before: bent over from the waist with her hands hanging an inch above the sidewalk in front of her feet. I kept nagging at her to stand up straight. She laughed an embarrassed laugh and stood upright for a few seconds before bending over again.

One day on the drive to the hospital, with Denise in the front seat and Whitey and me in the backseat, my father told us that Denise was "coming on" to him, and he was taking advantage of it. Whitey stiffened up, tightened his mouth, looked straight ahead. I knew his strong convictions against interfering in others' lives. My own years of abuse and incest from my father were still locked away in my own closet of demons. Neither Whitey nor I responded to my father's admission.

My stepmother finally told me about her daughter's rapes a year later, after Denise was already fortressing herself in her upstairs room with everything she could drag and carry from everywhere in the house. My father was still living in the house as though nothing had happened. Denise was already hitting and punching her mother and flying over the dinner table on top of my father toppling him backward onto the floor, screaming, "Why you do that, Daddy Bill?" 

I begged my stepmother to press charges and prosecute my father. I promised I'd help her send him to prison. The only action she took was to move him to the upstairs bedroom opposite Denise's bedroom.

During later visits, I asked my father questions. "Did you rape Denise?"

"Only God and I know that," he replied.

"Are you going to rape her again?"

"I don't know that. You don't know that. No one knows that."

I can still see his blank face and his wide eyes staring at me.

Donahue changed my life one early morning in Minneapolis. His cable show was aired on TV at 1 a.m.  Our band members were gathered in Whitey's and my Holiday Inn room after a night's performance in the nightclub, as we prepared to go out for our routine early-morning "breakfast." 

I was sitting at the end of the bed half-watching Donahue's show on TV. Donahue was interviewing a woman sitting alone in the spotlight. Her parents were up above in the shadows to protect their identities. The woman talked about the impact of incest on her throughout her life, about standing against the closet door full of her anger to hold it shut while the anger seeped out through the cracks around the door. 

I started paying attention. Her story was my story! Every detail she described was my experience, my acting out, my secret pain. Yes! I was an incest victim, too, and I thought I'd escaped it unharmed. In the end, the woman had written a book, and in a final dramatic moment when she revealed that she was a lesbian, the audience gasped. 

Donahue's show was over, but my show had begun, and I was alone in the spotlight of sudden, sickening awareness of the ways I'd acted out my anger and outrage for so many years. When I stood up to leave with the others, I felt dizzy and sick at my stomach. I told Whitey and the other band members to go to breakfast without me, but Whitey sent the others on and stayed with me. I cried loud, angry tears. I had wanted my stepmother to send my father to prison, not for Denise, but for me. A light had turned on in me that would alter the course of my life.

Whitey and I returned to Canton together a few times after we knew about Denise. On one of the visits, Whitey teased me afterwards about getting the "Nasty Child Award for the Day" when I calmly asked my father to move out of that home. He had already fathered a baby daughter with his girlfriend in another relationship. A week later he moved in with them.

I needed counseling. Whitey and I dissolved our band and settled in Colorado Springs. We performed as a duo act for a year. He was already a professional pilot and instructor, so he got a job with a small flight operation. I started seeing a psychologist. Several years later, he and I separated, and I went back on the road as a single act.

After five years, in the final days before the deadline when criminal prosecution would no longer be permitted, my stepmother retained an attorney and pressed charges against my father.

A Grand Jury judge decided that the criminal case would not go to trial. The judge was "corrupt," according to the attorney who handled the civil case several years later. My father wrote to me, "Thank goodness for our justice system!" 

Over my years performing alone on the road, I returned to Canton to visit my stepmother. One day the neighbor answered the door when I knocked. I could hear my stepmother wailing in the living room. Her leg was elevated on a footstool, her ankle was swollen, and her cheek was ripped open. Denise had attacked her and had been taken in a straight jacket to the hospital's mental unit. My stepmother's other daughters were urging her to put Denise in a home, but my mother would not even consider that. Denise was hers.

On one of my Canton visits, I met my father in a restaurant.

"You raped Denise, didn't you?" I said.

 "That's between me and God," he answered, his face blank, his eyes wide and staring. 

I pictured myself standing up and turning the table upside down, crashing the chairs against the floor until they broke into small pieces, racing over to the windows and jerking down the curtains. Instead, I quietly told him that I would never see him again. His dishonesty was too upsetting. He said, "That's okay. I understand. I can get along fine without you."

I saw him again six years later, when I returned to Canton to testify against him in a civil court case on Denise's behalf. My father represented himself and cross-examined me. A few weeks later, we received notice that the jury found him guilty. He was bankrupt. My father would never pay for his crime. 

He wouldn't allow his wife to be present at the trial. I was on good terms with her, and on this day, I wanted her to know that my father was guilty, that he was a predator and a pedofile, and if she didn't protect her ten-year-old daughter, my father would harm her, too. After the trial, I went to their home. They sat across the table from me, and for two hours, we had it out. To write what happened would take several books, but in the end, she told me she believed me and would protect her daughter.

In the months that followed my father's trial, I noticed that I was calmer and my anger had subsided. My visits back to Canton revealed healing of the relationship between Denise and my stepmother. What helped us was to know that others agreed that what my father had done was wrong.

I've averaged an hour a day watching Casey Anthony's blank face and large staring eyes and listening to the testimony. I've watched the trial re-runs and commentary on the news. The public doesn't know what happened to her little girl. The jury doesn't know. Casey knows. Now she walks free-- like O.J. Simpson walked free. 

Not knowing the truth about what happened when the person sitting there knows sends us all into a collective boil. This trial has taken us back to other times when others inside blank faces and large eyes lied to us. 

Ultimately, it takes us back into our own everyday lies to ourselves and others. We make up excuses for not doing things we don't really want to do. We withhold information. We blame others for our shortcomings. We make up justifications for our actions and hide our true feelings from ourselves. This trial and its abrupt ending forces us to ask ourselves the question: Who am I really mad at?

Before You Think You're Ready, Write and Publish!

If you're a writer with a lifetime of written works, published or unpublished, readers with those cute little electronic tablets are waiting for you--all over the world! Don't be like me and wait until the eleventh hour of your life to round up your writing and get your stuff published into e-books, audiobooks, and even hard copies of books for book signing events.
 
If you're a writer with a brain full of ideas for novels, short stories, and true-life stories, start writing! For a small outlay, you can get them published in e-books and get them online to all the places where readers look for books.
 
Even this blog that you're reading right now will one day be an e-book, an autobiography of sorts!  I plan to call it Search for Myself. I think that's what our entire life's journey is all about.

Tips for Getting Ready to Publish

When you've finished writing a book, get it ready to publish by taking these steps:

• Find an editor--not just a friend, but a person with a formal education and a strong background in English who can read for logical content, sentence mechanics, grammar, and punctuation. Even the best writers need editors! Readers don't like to find spelling and grammar errors when they're reading a book.
• Ask your editor to help you find a proofreader to give your book a final read-through. The editor who has already spent hours working with your book may not be the best proofreader. 
• Decide if you're going to target your how-to book or story for the enhanced electronic readers or just for the standard electronic reader. If you haven't already, go to Barnes & Noble and ask for a demonstration of their electronic reader, the Nook. They have a standard reader that shows just B&W text, and they have a new enhanced model out, the NookColor. An author can add music, videos, color photos and even animations to the e-book for the enhanced version. The NookColor is hard to pass up! You might want to add in music and pictures for future readers with fancy gadgets! 
• Decide how you want your book cover to look and gather photos for it, if you decide to have them. Look up the standards for a professional book cover. How should it look in order to sell well? Then you can judge whether the graphic artist creates a cover that meets those standards.

E-Book Formatting/Publishing/Distributing Companies

Decide whether you will format your e-book yourself or send it off to a company for formatting. BookBaby's ads (see more below) say that they will help you format your own book if you go with their company. That might imply that they will not do the job for you, but give you the directions for doing it yourself. Listed below are some options for formatting and distributing your e-book: 

Amazon

  
Amazon.com has guidelines for formatting an e-book for their Kindle reader. My new Facebook friend, Allen Applen, has written e-books, formatted for Kindle and sold on the Amazon site. 

Allen Applen's Books on Amazon 

He wrote that his understanding is that readers with the Barnes and Noble's "Nook" can also access and read a book formatted for Kindle.

For more information,  go to this site:

Publishing E-books for Amazon's Reader, Kindle 

Then click on "Community" and then go down to "Voice of Author/Publisher" Allen writes, 'Whenever I have a question I ask and someone answers."

The Cadence Group 

 The Cadence Group   

This is a professional design, editorial, sales, marketing, and project management provider for the book and publishing industry. They select only projects that have strong market potential. Check out this web site for what is involved in publishing and marketing a book.

Smashwords   

Smashwords 

This is a free service that will format your e-book, give it an ISBN number, and distribute it in the required format to each of the major retailers online. You submit your book in Microsoft Word. You will earn 60% from major retailers; 85% for each download from the Smashwords site.

BookBaby   

BookBaby 

They will format your e-book, and they'll distribute it in the required format to each of the major retailers online. (On their ads, they say they will "help you" format your book.) You submit your book in Microsoft Word. You will pay up front for their services, including the cover and ISBN number, but you will earn 100% of the sales. Charge for formatting and distribution is $99. BookBaby will not show you your book formatting, because they say it looks different depending on what device it’s being displayed.

Publishgreen 

Publishgreen 

They will format your e-book and distribute it in the required format to each of more than 28 major e-book retailers online. You submit your book in Microsoft Word. You will pay up front for their services—$400-$1000.  You will keep “up to 100%” of the sales.

Evergreen says they will format your book by hand, and not “smash” the words together like the other ebook companies. They say “smashed” books are "ugly books." You can download sample e-books on their site to see.

CD Duplication Companies (for audiobooks & music) 

If you're going to write a book and you have a budget that allows for it, why not also record your story? You can record in your own home if you have recording software, or a Mac. You can also buy studio time, or trade services with a recording studio owner. You can duplicate your tracks into CDs (Short run! No one needs 1,000 copies piled up in the basement!) for selling at events, and CDBaby will distribute your audiobook online to all of the places where readers can download it. Here are the links:

Discmakers for cover design and duplication services

CDBaby for duplication and online distribution services

Marketing

You will also need a marketing plan in place. Facebook is not the only answer. You'll have to accumulate a great e-mail list and write on all of the social networking sites. There is a lot of marketing how-to information online.

It's Time!

Robert Fritz, in his book Creating writes that the time to begin creating is before you think you're ready.

Get busy and write the Great American Novel. Dash off a self-help book if you have information about a subject or a skill to teach. Write your life. You know it's a good story! I'll read it--as soon as I publish my stuff. 

My first priority: e-book and audiobook titled Life with a Buckskinner--my memoir and published stories about my husband Whitey and me in the 1970's-80's. My sister giggled through all of the stories while I recorded them last week. Maybe other listeners and readers will, too.

Mountain Man Whitey on his horse King