Every morning I reconnect my self

Red sun at morning; sailor take warning.

The reality is that reality is weird

I reconstruct who I am and what I’m connected to every day when I get up.

I’m discombobulated until I see what the world looks like, what the internet has to show.

When no one else is up, that’s when I sing. Because if I don’t do it periodically, now that we don’t go to church, and do not have our folksinging group, my vocal chords get weird, rough, scatchy – and it scares the heck out of me, because my singing voice, and the ability to sing loudly and well is still an important part of that ‘self.’

I am a singer.

This morning it was Bridge over troubled water a capella, with Simon and Garfunkle in my head.

And Root like a rose with Emmylou Harris on Youtube. And Abide with me, which we listened to in an Irish TV show with a burial. Lovely, but I had to work with it to get the lifts in the right place in the melody because I have lyrics and video – but no sheet music.

And The sisters of mercy with Leonard Cohen – beautiful gravelly voice on his own song.

And now I’m ready to face that part of the day.

The sun was so weird.

I went to check on the plants by our only east window, to see if they had enough water with the instrument I have. They did.

But in the window was the image above, EAST – not north or west – the rising sun was even more blood red, from the fires, than the image I captured after I fetched the iPhone.

Apocalyptic.

Somewhere in Pride’s Children PURGATORY it says something about the tourists too stupid to know that magnificent sunsets out over the Pacific are caused by air pollution.

But this was sunRISE, and in the opposite direction.

It just had to be food for thought.

I was up too early, couldn’t get back to sleep. I’ll crash later for a while.

Swimming has been canceled

Because they don’t want us exposed to the bad quality air, it is recommended that we not spend time outside right now, and of course the indoor pool was not made available.

Something about the county may be responsible for both: I’m not going to blame management – they’re trying.

We’ve been told to just let next week’s schedule’s signups be this week’s, so people don’t have to stand in line today to get a couple of slots next week.

I’m not going to complain about little restrictions when there are people losing their lives and their homes (including two of our staff members who live in Vacaville and lost their homes).

But I’ve really got to stop asking, “Now what?” Because it keeps coming up with ‘whats.’ The universe. Karma. Bad luck.

Mississippi Public Broadcasting’s best SF program

A MPB program to teach kids about libraries and the Dewey Decimal System – by using a SF story set in the future when actual books had disappeared. Prescient? Or just logical.

From The New Yorker:

If for some strange reason you’ve never heard of “Tomes and Talismans,” just know this: it’s quite possibly the finest post-apocalyptic educational series about library science ever produced by Mississippi Public Television.

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/library-science-fiction-tomes-and-talismans

This is from 1986.

The kids and I watched it when we homeschooled. We were talking with the offspring just last night, and it came up, and we all agreed it was pretty interesting (especially for its time) even if dated.

You can find the first episode on Youtube – but they never finished their promise to put it up for sale or viewing, so I left a message to that effect on the MPB Facebook page, and got the response, “Good idea!” when I suggested it was a good one for the kids during the pandemic – and their parents. We’ll see if anything happens.

Meanwhile, having an eldest educated at Caltech in Computer Science, I have been given a link to a place where I can see it.

The pigeons have tried to move in

For some unfathomable reason, some of the Davis pigeons have decided that our bare concrete fourth-floor balcony with a few folding chairs is a suitable place to spend time.

It wouldn’t be a problem except 1) they coo constantly, and 2) they poo constantly.

So I am using a plastic syringe and a container of water (because I can’t find my water pistol) to discourage them.

I sit by the window all day, attempting to write fiction. It cannot be done with a cooer in the background.

And now I am reconnected to the world and the internet, about to visit the Washington Post and The New York Times briefly to see how the pandemic is going, and try to get to work for the day. I’m getting very good at ignoring the stories, hitting just the terrible headlines and graphs.

So drop a line about how you reconnect with your self and your world every morning.

Or is it just me?

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I have no idea where WordPress put Categories, so we don’t have any today.

I also don’t know where the list of previous Tags is stored, so I could choose them.

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Locked down with the virus at the door

STRESSORS TO THE RIGHT OF US, STRESSORS TO THE LEFT

If you live in a retirement community, you are surrounded by vulnerable people – it is the nature of the beast.

Once you move here, they become your friends and neighbors, and you care what happens to them, to the facility, and to yourself in the place you have chosen for your ‘forever home.’

When you get the WEEKLY notice of the results of testing (the whole staff is now being tested once a week):

1. A private duty aide tested positive.
   • We received results on 8/20.
   • We have not identified prolonged direct exposure to other staff members.
   • This individual provided care for 5 residents. Each of these individuals has been contacted and will be tested. None of these 5 residents are believed to have had any contact with other residents or staff.

and you realize that those in charge are thinking that they will have to continue ‘at least two more weeks as a result of the positive case,’ you also realize they are living in a dream world where, without treatment, cure, or vaccine, they think it’s going to get better – OR they’re saying that because they think WE might feel better – you realize you are living in a situation that you have no control over, and it will continue for a very long time to come.

Everyone is under stress ALL the time

We took the not-fun stress of getting older, old enough to move into a place where you are no longer responsible for a house and yard, and moved.

We haven’t recovered, not really, from the move.

We have never quite completely moved in – the assistant we were hiring is not permitted to come in and help because she is not considered ‘essential.’

The ‘private duty aides’ ARE essential – but that doesn’t mean they don’t have a life, a home, kids, families – and go home to them every day.

We live in a web of interconnections

The reason we are here is because we estimate that some point in the future we will need the help the aides provide, and it is much easier to do it through a facility than one of us caring for the other.

Our kids will probably never all live close, and we made this move so they wouldn’t become caretakers or even arrangers of care, because, with all the good will in the world, it is a humongous job to take care of parents.

None of us planned for such a far-reaching and deadly pandemic.

Je Ne Regrette Rien – moving was the right decision.

But we were going to move, dump the house and responsibilities, and travel – from a home base which we could just turn the key on and forget.

We’re in the age group where, if we take reasonable care, we could expect to live another 30 years. I want to go home to Mexico to visit my family. I want to find a way to do some gentle travel to Europe. If I ever get a bit better, I would love to ski again.

Or hike. Or camp (even in an RV instead of a tent).

With the kids, I want to do a family vacation every year, so they stay connected with us and with each other, and we have fun.

There has been a kink in the plans.

I struggle every day to write, while at the same time fully realizing that stress kills, and there is too much on everyone right now.

Here is a stress inventory.

It is good to take one periodically, to see if things are under control, and if they are getting better or worse.

IIRC, inventory numbers over 300 are practically a direct warning of major illness coming soon, and lower numbers are not ignorable.

I don’t dare take the inventory right now.

Instead, I am taking every possible relaxation approach to dealing with what I know is there.

An important part of dealing with stress is simply acknowledging it

And looking for a time in the (we hope near) future when it will be less.

Which is what we were aiming for, until the latest notice from the county which put the kibosh on using the outdoor pool (which was about to go from 3 to 5 days a week) – because of a new menace, FIRES!

And realizing that others have it far worse than we do.

So, when it gets stressful, I blog – and dump some of it.

Records, records, records

I’m also recording for posterity, as these post are part of the ‘accidental autobiography’ I’m creating by writing bits and pieces in a series of places: emails to friends, notes on the computer, annotations in the Production File I have open for every scene I write, blog posts, and the unlikely storage in social media.

I just requested a current copy of my Facebook information – and will store it on the external hard drive.

Wattpad deleted the forums – and did not give us a chance to do that – so I lost all my forum activity.

I did download everything I created for my Patreon account – some of which may be used again down the line if I serialize the second book, NETHERWORLD.

And I also realize that this is of importance to no one but myself.

And remind myself that I need to create a document for our children which summarizes the information about the family that they might like to have when we’re gone.

ASK YOURSELF what you need to do to reduce stress – and what you need to record for the future – and do it one of these days. Tell us in the comments!

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Laying out my writing wares for the passersby

I’m planning to revise the prideschildren.com site, and one of the things I’m mulling over is how does a fiction writer provide value for a visitor to her books’ site?

My personal blog here is all over the map, by design – the readers I hope to attract to buy and read Pride’s Children PURGATORY (Book 1), the prequel short story, and, as they are available, Books 2 and 3, NETHERWORLD and…? are not necessarily interested in my opinions and experiences as an recent inhabitant of a Continuing Care Retirement Community (CCRC).

What do I hope for from readers of my fiction who get to the other site, say, from the link in the back of Book 1, or from a recommendation from a friend?

Without answering these questions, I have no hope of supplying these readers with something they value, preferably something they NEED.

What do my readers NOT need?

I decided to visit the Amazon reviews of several novels that could realistically be called ‘comps’ – books that by their general complexity, genre (contemporary mainstream), style (reasonably realistic), length (big fat books), and language (literary) are similar to Pride’s Children.

There I’m going to check out the negative reviews, and found what made readers unhappy. I’ll ignore the reviews which are too general, and look for specific buzz-killers.

And then I’ll pull some quotes from my own reviews (many fewer, of course) that point out I don’t commit these sins. If true.

Here’s the list, paraphrased for conciseness:

• unbelievable due insufficient character development
• The sentences, paragraphs, passages… all just SO incredibly long
• I got halfway through and I felt as if nothing happened
• There was not a single character that I cared about
• The dishonesty of most characters was so out of my comfort level
• two of the least interesting characters I’ve ever encountered in literature
• digs in to all the nasty-ness entailed in living a life of degrading self abuse via abuse of various substances
• I made it to page 354 and then skipped, skipped, skipped
• a blow-by-blow, second-by-second rendering of the narrator’s life
• I thought it would never end
• I simply didn’t enjoy the story enough to appreciate the pages and pages about the meaning of life.
• Lacks: an interesting narrative, a plot, a satisfying ending
• pretentious, long winded, tiresome, tepid novel
• unedited and rambling and somehow that’s supposed to make it literary
• why did it take [almost 800] pages to tell that story
• filled with so many ludicrous plot holes that it’s just not something I can stomach
• a descent into a bottomless well of self-pity, gloom, and urban angst
• the punctuation and structure of sentences is horrid to the point that it’s extremely difficult, if not impossible, to follow the thought process of the author
• there are missing words, wrong words and misspelled words throughout the book
• goes on about [X or Y topics] too long
• … talks about how precarious [character’s] finances are and yet they live in a [very fancy place], take cabs everywhere and seem to eat out all the time.
• …why wasn’t author consistent?
• illogical transportation
  
• The character’s conversations were completely unbelievable. He’s supposed to be a X, give him the voice, thoughts and mannerisms of X!
• Author seemed to be grandstanding about how much she knows about Z.
• I find the reference … overly coy. Just name it, or make up a name.
  
• [Plot point] was excruciatingly long (not in a you-are-there way; in a boring and overly-lengthy way) and repetitive. Author could have accomplished so much more with so much less.
• Author overused words that tend to jump out at the reader like “loitering” and “grappling.” Does author not own a Thesaurus? It would be so easy to substitute synonyms…

From my reviewers (completely unprompted – I didn’t know these readers when I wrote PC):

• I just read PC in 10 hours straight, and I am speechless.
• …you have managed the best instance of “the story is not finished, but this segment of it feels finished” that I have ever encountered.
• just wanted to say its VERY GOOD, and what an ironic and sharp eye you have for le mot juste, and the silence pregnant. Very enjoyable, no sign of the damaged mind but I resonate strongly with your main character
• I had meant to read up on it ages ago and just never did, so I glommed everything last week. Now i’m like, damn it, i have to WAIT for more?! Noooooooooooooooo
  So just keep it up. No pressure of adoring fans or anything.
• Very character-driven, very slow burn, very subtle. I loved it. The characters are rich and real. The scenes build upon one another with clear purpose. The writing is exquisitely careful.
• I read chapter 1 out of curiosity, chapter 2 out of interest; the rest of the story will keep me up all night. Beautiful.
• I put it off because it didn’t really seem like my kind of story. But I loved it. You did a great job.
• Your writing puts me in mind of the classics only in modern era. Those are the stories that will live forever. They scream for detail and need the long way around.

• Pride’s Children has helped me to look inside myself and see many things I need to see and deal with. I have never read a work of fiction that has touched me so powerfully! I love it and will be rereading many times. You did not cause any pain .
  You gave me increased awareness of myself.

• Just finished reading and posted a review on Amazon. I loved it! I’m impressed by the infinite care that you put into it, the choice of words (so sensitive!) and the absolute lack of typos, that’s something of a record!

And more.

Is tooting your own horn a good or a bad thing?

In the indie writer world, if the author doesn’t do it, it doesn’t happen.

I didn’t write the words in the section above – I somehow inspired them. I have permission from their authors to use them any way I want.

It still feels like something my mother would disapprove of, as she reared me to be a proper woman so many years ago, in Mexico, in the 60s – with a style and morality more like the US in the 40s.

Modesty is a virtue, but women have come a long way from that upbringing.

In any case, I plan to use both my reviewers words and my own published and pre-published words to reach the readers I want to attract.

It is my hope that if I can get the right readers to try – a few words, a few pages, a few chapters – that they will stick, and they will like what I have written for them.

Because I love having this effect on another human being.

Please join in with your pet peeve about writers or books – I’d love to read them!

And will try to avoid them.

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Based on a prompt: Baby Egg

 

THIS ONE’S FOR MARIAN

She insisted I should finish it.

I decided to give myself a few more words than the 100-word limit of the Drabble – it takes time to shorten, and I’m in the middle of NETHERWORLD, but her prompt inspired me, and here it is:

BABY EGG

She went every day to visit the baby egg. Through its translucent shell, her first child grew peacefully, with her heart sound piped in, and a gentle periodic rocking to simulate her walking around the kitchen.

Protestors screamed outside the lab that it was unnatural.

But it had finally removed Eve’s curse: no birth. No stretching the body out of shape. No pause in the ability to work. No pain. No surrogates wanting to keep the babies they carried for others.

She’d have to be in town when the baby ripened, but, other than that, she couldn’t see why she wouldn’t bond perfectly well with her offspring – after all, adopted babies did fine, didn’t they? There was the oxytocin nasal spray, and the hormones for lactation, and the nanny to do all the changing of dirty diapers.

It should be a hoot to play with when she had some time.

Here’s Marian‘s prompt:

It’s a baby egg. The neighbors got chickens that lay teeny wee eggs and gave me some. I had tomatoes from the farmers market, so I made a marriage in heaven.

She has a cute picture of a very small egg in her hand.

For the record, this is the new ‘block editor’ for WordPress, and I hate it.

Any time you change things I was perfectly happy with, I resent the huge loss of time.

I no longer have any idea where the things I depended on have gone.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

They do realize some of us have damaged brains, right?

I have no idea how to access the media, or how to insert an image, or…

Pretty much sums up my life.

And I have no idea what this will look like, vertical-spacing-wise.

SIGH!

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Tiny touch of normalcy in the middle of a pandemic

NORMAL FEELS GOOD, EVEN MASKED

Episode #1 – The Affair of the Tricycle Seat Repair

This isn’t my tricycle – mine is a mystery brand – but it is extremely similar. One of the things that was normal this past week was a trip to the Tinker’s Den, my first.

Here at URC, an early resident refused to move in unless he was allowed to bring his basement workshop and woodworking tools. So they accommodated him by building a room off the corner of the south underground garage, and named it the Tinker’s Den. That was 20 years ago, and the workshop is used by a variety of people doing projects.

Well, earlier in the week I finally took the trike seat off because something was wrong and it had way too much side movement, but I hadn’t been able to see what was wrong while it was attached.

When I got it upstairs, I figured out the where the seat was attached to the post, a nut had come off of a bolt, and the bolt was sitting diagonally at an odd angle, attaching nothing.

To make the story short, I called Tenney, the resident whose name is listed for the Den, and we spent an enjoyable if somewhat frustrating hour or so taking the seat apart to get at the bolt, finding a replacement one (the one on the trike must be metric, so our nut jar didn’t have a suitable replacement), and putting the whole back together – and having a nice chat as I helped.

I miss doing that in the basement of our New Jersey house, where I had a full workshop – and plenty of nuts and bolts in jars before we moved. Of course, there had been no need to use a workshop for two years here.

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Episode #2: The Affair of the Head Shot

The other bit of normal life was another request of another resident: I have arranged to have an interview of me as a writer published on a blog, and the blogger kindly sent me a list of questions – and a request for a photo.

On her site, I saw that the photos of other authors were much better quality and definition than the snapshot cutouts I have normally used before (yes, I knew I’d have to do something about it some day, but when you’re indie, there are a lot of things on the list).

In any case, when we came to URC, Marion had done a very nice job with her very good camera of taking pictures for the Resident Directory, so I asked if she would take a few for me for the purpose of a head shot – and she kindly agreed.

We settled on Friday morning at 11 (I cannot guarantee being up and functional earlier, though I often am, and I didn’t want to have to call, bleary-eyed, and reschedule).

She had walked around a couple of days before at that time so as to find some good backdrops among the greenery, so we set off to take pictures, her walking (she’s 91), and me on Maggie2.

And spent about an hour using various pieces of greenery as backdrops – and then she put the twenty or so photos on a flash stick which I downloaded to my computer last night.

We were masked, and stayed the required 6 feet apart for most of the time, but talked as we went, and I am so grateful because we have no idea when real normal will return, and I was dreading the whole process (I don’t usually like my pictures), but quite a few of the ones she took are very good. She is amazing.

She was surprised that I want to do the photo editing myself, something I’m reasonably competent at – but I’m really not good at selfies, and an outside photo place is not in the cards right now.

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Episode #3: The book blogger reads

And finally, I found out via Mention, where I set up a request that sends me an email when Pride’s Children PURGATORY is mentioned anywhere on the web, that a book blogger whose site Written Among the Stars I visit regularly (she does very good reviews) has started to read it, and her thoughts thus far are:

“This was another one that the writing style took me a little while to jump into to and I was a bit concerned that maybe the story just wasn’t for me. It didn’t take long though for me to catch up and really start to enjoy myself. I adore Andrew. He is quirky, funny, smarmy and just so much fun.”

You know how hard it can be to persuade someone to read something different – and all authors try to find sources for more reviews – so I am very happy that she persisted, and am looking forward to hear what she thinks of the whole.

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Little things matter when you’ve been in quarantine a long time.

Please use the comments to tell your stories of what makes you feel normal right now!

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How to torture your favorite writer

THIS IS OLD – BUT THE PRINCIPLE STANDS

I haven’t advertised in ages, because I haven’t figured out exactly how to do it when you write in a 1) smaller niche (mainstream love story), that is 2) usually NOT indie (and you write indie), and are 3) slow (so there won’t be another book for readers for a while longer).

As an expected result, sales are slow (but someone bought a paperback this month – Yay!).

And, under certain conditions, you can SEE a reader take your book out of KU and read a few pages (first yellow bar – around 10, maybe 11 if the next bar was right after midnight).

And then read a few pages every once in a while.

From a later graph and adding all the page reads (PC is just under 400 pages), I think the reader finished by May 19th.

Slow writers take our encouragement where we can get it

But it is amusing to watch a graph like this one (and the speeding up at the end) go by when you are doing your daily check.

And to decide what you’re going to assume about the reader (since you have no data but the few points on the graph, which you assume come from the same borrow) based on NO OTHER INFORMATION.

In this case, I assumed a busy life, and a few pages read at bedtime by someone who KNEW they had to get up in the morning to work. Fair enough?

READERS owe writers NOTHING

I will say that as many times as necessary.

Once the book is on the open market, buying – or borrowing from KU – is more than enough for a reader to give the writer.

At that point, we hope they will enjoy it.

Anything else, a rating, a review, a recommendation – is above and beyond, and a gift.

If a reader buys the paper book, we usually don’t even find out if they read it unless a review shows up (these can really make your day; the absence is just normal reader behavior, because few review).

Between the reader and the writer

This has been the contract (a one-way contract) almost forever: I will read.

Going to the next level of writing a fan letter was very rare, even in the olden days.

Doing anything else other than having a warm feeling for the experience (if that happens) nowadays is as rare.

When you see a book with many reviews, it is usually because the book sold many copies – and the usual percentage (tiny) of readers left their impression.

Occasionally, a very good (or very bad) book may solicit a higher percentage – meaning it hit readers in the gut.

Torture away

Writers don’t expect much feedback

Our readers are mostly not writers – they are the people we hope to serve entertainment to.

But it is possible (probably unconsciously) to torture your writer – by proving you can put the book down, over and over.

If you need to do that, please go ahead. It does require you borrow the book from Kindle Unlimited first – and then read it a tiny bit at a time.

Know that the torture is even better because Amazon pays authors not when the book is borrowed, but as the pages are read.

You’re welcome.

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PS: I’m going through my files of draft posts I never finished to see if any still tickle my fancy. This one did.

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