The End of this blog

I am ending this blog because it is so poorly coded that whenever I attempt to copy text into this space it appears blank. I can no longer waste time here. I will leave the previous posts up until such time as I can transfer them to a new 'Writing' blog on Wordpress.

Thanks to all those who have read my thoughts here.

Ted Smith

The 2017 Indie Fringe to Frankfurt Book Fair

I attended - well actually, I am still attending. the Alliance of Independent Authors' Fringe conference to the Frankfurt Book Fair.  For those not familiar with these three annual Fringe conferences I will describe them.  There are three major book fairs each year:  The London Book Fair in the Spring/late Winter; Book Expo America (apparently now called simply 'Book Expo') in the U.S. - usually in New York but one year it was in Chicago; the Frankfurt Book Fair.  The Alliance of Independent Authors is the largest and most active and most importantly, professional organization for indie authors. Some years ago they began 'fringe' conferences for indie authors held in conjunction with these three fairs.  They assemble experts in different aspects of writing, marketing, publishing and the business of writing and publishing. These experts prepare podcast or video presentations that are available an hour at a time for 24 hours over the weekend of each fair. These remain available, I  hasten to add, for a very long time on the Alli YouTube channel. The guiding lights of Alli actually attend the main book fairs in person where they will interview on the floor at the event; or have Q & A sessions, etc. There is one caveat to this: BookExpo is not friendly to Indie authors, or authors at all, so attendance is from a hotel room nearby. Frankfurt is cool to authors unless brought by old line publishers or agents, but is not hostile; London is the most accommodating and is in fact outright friendly to the Indie community.

In recent years there has been a thematic focus at each Fringe. London is given over to writing, New York to marketing and Frankfurt to the business of being an indie author.  Of course all three themes overlap, but I have found this to be an effective division and the vast majority of sessions are practical and of great use to me. The conference is entirely free because of sponsors such as Ingram Spark and others.

This year's Frankfurt Fringe is ongoing for me because I am super busy all the time and when I have a free hour (free for me means I am doing something where I can listen to the podcast or video while doing a mindless, but necessary household task) I watch or listen to a session. At this moment I am in my kitchen writing this blog as my dishwasher runs - I have to stay with it as one year it caught fire and I had to shove it out the back door to prevent disaster. I am part way through a Q & A session chaired by Porter Anderson, which I will get back to when I come to empty the dishwasher.

I jotted down a few notes on main points I have taken away from this Fringe so far:

KDP rocket to see what’s selling on amazon 

Kindle spy

Help me choose a cover

Connecto/ connect explore 

must have a static web site (I do) but Need contact form on website &  newest book on the main page

only write what you are passionate about; what you enjoy - this is the first and foundational point of any business plan for an indie author. If you have something hanging around nearly ready that does not fall into this basic category, get it off your plate and out of the way so you can concentrate on rule #1. You will not make a living at writing by concentrating on genres or styles or topics that you are not passionate about even though the may be   trendy.  

There are more once I get time to sort things out in my mind, but these are the most important to me at my stage in writing.

Is writing a book review, writing?

On my other Blogger blog I wrote a preliminary assessment of a religious history focussed on mid 19th century Newfoundland. I am engaged in writing a review of this book for a scholarly journal, as I am an historian who specialized in Anglicanism.  Here I decided to post a few thoughts about writing book reviews and especially those for scholarly journals.

I am a writer, sometimes successful in terms of money earned, more often not. I don't think of myself as an author as the term seems too pretentious for me, though not for others. If I were indeed an author I think I would have to wear a tweed jacket and smoke a pipe and have one of those professional head shots you see on the back covers of hardback novels.  I am not that. I am merely someone who cannot stop writing words. I write poetry primarily, but also history. My main work is a combination of poetry, romance, prose, photographs, drawings, fonts, etc etc.

So, is writing a book review for a scholarly journal, writing? Am I functioning here as an historian which is my day job, or am I a writer firstly?

I don't yet have the answer, BTW. I am writing this blog post to sort this out in my own mind.  I tend at this point to say that a book review is evidence of my status as 'writer' more than my status as 'academic historian'.

But, is separating one's persona into discrete categories a reflection of reality?  I teach the history of religion and emphasize that the use of categories for all things and all people and all human constructs is part of modernity. But the world only began to enter 'modernity' about 500 years ago. Five hundred years is a long time in human terms, but a blip in terms of the existence of humanity which goes back perhaps a million years.

On my writer's web page I have this:

My brain is a dusty old attic with boxes on shelves in no particular order. Sometimes a box teeters and falls and the box spills open and poems, stories, observations fall scattered about on the floor. I may pick up one that attracts my gaze and bring it out for others to see.

he danced on the dusty floor sending clouds of dust  higher and more, laughing and sneezing all at one as he was draped in a fine powder of poems and things.

This is not a description of a man who categorizes anything much. Perhaps I should leave it at that. As long as I am making words fit together, I am writing. 

Hmmmmm

I had actually forgotten about this blog!  I am so immersed now in actually writing rather than writing about writing that ... well.... look!  I haven't posted here since June of last year.

I was thinking tonight about my first efforts at writing. I was 13 and I scribbled away at my desk at home on yellow lined paper with a pencil. I had attended church with my family and something in the sermon sparked me. So while my mother made Sunday lunch I wrote about Religion & Science - my opinion then being that as Science advanced, Religion would decline. Nothing is ever that neat and simple, or at least not in my experience. But the act of writing was an expurgation to me. This is still a central motivation for me to write: to expunge built up accretions of ideas and emotions. I learned a second motivation in that early essay:  I like to fashion words into sentences... elegant, or clumsy or neat and concise... I enjoy moving words around. Now, with computers and word processors that is relatively easy, but then it involved erasing or scribbling out and writing in above, or worse if using a typewriter it means redoing an entire page and maybe the page after. I don't recall rewriting any of this first essay.

It was followed by others as I felt such release and such satisfaction in the act of writing. Hmmmm. This sounds like sex! Hmmmmm.

Feeling Sick and being male and writing

Men, as legend has it, are big babies when ill. I am ill, sick, under the weather, and altogether discombobulated. I am writing this to see if I can write while sick. I have a doozie of a cold - coughing, snotting, headache, achy in general but worst of all, a thick, cotton filled mind.

Part of me is different from the standard issue male. That different part has always stood aside from 'me' and observed 'me' - coolly and dispassionately inside my head watching and taking notes. Now that separate from me, me is assessing if I am indeed playing up my illness for sympathy - even self pity.

I'm not sure as I now feel the first small signs of healing, just as a few days ago I felt that first scratchiness in my throat that I ignored. I don't get much sympathy anyway and I live pretty much alone here in my head and for the past few weeks physically also.

I suppose men do like sympathy in illness, and just as the other side of the legendary coin has it, women soldier on, needing no sympathy and able to function as normal even when sick.

Mostly I am annoyed as I have so much work to do, both writing and teaching and I resent the intrusion of illness.

Erica Ehrenberg is DANGEROUS

I was given a subscription to the Paris Review this year (or maybe last - I can't recall if it was for Christmas 2015 or my birthday in January....when you get old years zip by and leave you trying hard to remember what year it is, let along the month or day of the week. Everything is rushing to an unknown conclusion).

I dip into the two issues I have now, mostly the digital versions on my iPhone as I can pick that up and put it down (virtually anyway) when ever. I just read a short bit of prose poetry by Erica Ehrenberg. Because I had no idea who she was, I read it...

I could taste and feel every word image there.

I then googled her (I misspelled her name, but Google  that ever-helpful cyber thing corrected me) - no Wikipedia article sadly, but a very short bio in the Harvard Review - then I clicked on the poem published there.

DANGER!!!  DANGER!!! DANGER!!!

She writes as I wish I could. When I began writing poetry again about seven years ago, I knew I could not read any other poetry as I have this terrible flaw that causes me to write in the same style as the person whose words I just read......as I wrote more and more I became more confident and allowed myself to read snippets of Cohen and of Catullus. But her work is too close to mine..... and I am addicted after only two...... they say that's all it takes with dangerous drugs! 

Sigh.

Blogs, blogs and more blogs

I have had this blog and a sister blog on the history of religion  for some time now. Recently I began other blogs using Wordpress, which works better as a combination blog and website. I wasn't sure what I would do to sort out this mess of blogs. My mind does tend to disorder which, against all rational evidence, I maintain is a strength. Well, no matter, it is.

What I have decided to do is maintain my two 'blogger' blogs as places where I can and will ruminate on general aspects and thoughts about religion and writing.

My WordPress blogs will be places where I present actual works that will be published, usually as eBooks. I came to this idea after attending two online Indie Fringe festivals - one congruent with the London Book Fair and the second at Book Expo America in Chicago, with a third this year to come at the same time as the Frankfurt Book Fair.

In the first fringe festival, Nina Amir presented a session on turning a blog into a book. My daily life is such that I rarely have good blocks of time free to write. Rather I usually have 10-15 minutes here and there throughout a day. Nina Amir's session noted that if you wrote three or four blog posts a week, each running around 3-400 words, by the end of a year you would have at least a 50,000 word first draft of a book. This I can do, no matter how constrained my writing time.

This is the genesis of my idea to separate the essential functions of each blogging platform. Blogger, or blogspot, is well designed for a straight blog, but less so for functioning also as a website. WordPress works well as a website, with a blog function attached.

So..... I have several books planned for WordPress:  The Man who fell from the Sky (in the editing stage now); World Religions, Religion and Society, a book about the experience of teaching online courses, and a few poetry books.  I am also working on a novel which is nearly in its editing stage so won't appear as a blog.

Thus, this blog about writing and the writer's life, will continue but better focussed now. My History of Religion blog will also continue with ideas, thoughts and observations as they occur to me about religion and how it functions in the world.

I may cheat a little from time to time by mentioning the books I am blogging as they take shape.

Public Speaking & Marketing

The other night I gave a half hour talk to a small group. Some nine years ago I wrote a book that serves as a guide and introduction to an historic site where I live in Hamilton, Ontario. This is Dundurn Castle, an 1830s mansion built by a colourful character, Sir Allan MacNab. A small group called the MacNab Circle meet once a year to hear a speaker and to talk about this man and his life. I must add I was their second choice. Their preferred speaker could not do this, so I was asked on her recommendation. This recommendation highlights one aspect of marketing - word of mouth - schmoozing - getting to know as many people as possible. You never know what that will lead to. Secondly, and more importantly, I learned a hard lesson. They were all very kind that evening, but I know my talk did not go well. There are good personal reasons for this, which I won't go into, but I was not, shall we say, a shining star in their 48 years of listening to talks once a year.

I decided to make this a 'learning experience'. I think it is absolutely vital for writers to become known  not just through your work, or through a 'dust jacket' photo (whether on an eBook or a printed book), but as a living, breathing human being. Small talks to small groups do this as do large talks to large groups. I did quite a few of these several years ago when I had a number of books coming out and became proficient at this particular skill. But several years had passed before this talk and I had lost the expertise.

It is a skill I need to relearn and more importantly to hone. I didn't allow myself enough time to prepare properly. I had to spend a great deal of time re-acquainting myself with the subject matter, which is vital. But this meant I had virtually no time to prepare a talk that grabbed and held the attention of the audience. I have to retrain myself so I appear open, friendly, knowledgable and someone worth the attention of an audience.

2016 to do file

Today I listened to one of Joanna Penn's podcasts. This was a chat with Jane Friedman. Both these experts offer sensible and pragmatic advice for indie authors. Jane Friedman recently posted this:

5 Industry Issues for Authors to watch in 2016

This post contained eminently practical advice for writers.  This was also the genesis for the podcast chat with Joanna Penn.

Three points stood out for me.

1. a new self publishing advice destination:  Hotsheet

This handy item provides indie authors with quick summaries of things to watch for in the digital publishing world - so you do not have to google around the net looking. It is produced by Jane Friedman and Porter Anderson.

2. Audio books. Apparently audio books are booming (no pun intended).  This idea has been stewing in my brain for a while. As it is, I have included audio in my multimedia experimental book, The Man who fell from the Sky

3. Most importantly, mobile devices:  More and more readers of eBooks are doing so on their so-called smartphones. Rather than reading on a Kindle, or a Nook, for example, people are reading books on their phones. Myself I have these apps on my iPhone: Kobo, iBooks, Kindle, Wattpad, Indigo, Gutenberg Pro, Goodreads, Bluefire and the Internet Archive. The advice at the very end of the podcast was to revamp your web page to be sure it is easily readable on a mobile device. Already I test my experimental ebook on my iPhone rather than an iPad or laptop.

PostScript:  I say 'so-called smartphones' because in reality  a 'smartphone' is a pocket computer that has the capability of making telephone calls - but fewer and fewer people are using these devices as phones.  Most often they are used as computers.

Books

My rather ambiguous title for this post was deliberate.  I love printed books - even the cheap sort where the pages fall out when first opened.  But I love eBooks now too, a kind of sister wives' scenario with reading.  I don't love the format most eBooks use - a bland font and no 'feel' to the book. Yet the iPhone, the iPad, the laptop and desktop computers produced by Apple have a designed beauty and tactility of their own. Where I can alter the font, or change colours in what I am reading I find a new delight in the sensuality of reading. Reading is for me, even when mining histories written in the pretence of social science, sensual.  I am presently re-reading Charles Taylor's 'A Secular Age' and I noticed how I enjoyed the semi-smooth, semi-rough feel of the paper of each page under my finger tips. This got me to thinking on a tangent. Which of my hundreds (thousands?) of books would I keep if I had room only for a handful?

Well, firstly I will discount my father's books I have - they are not great literature but have an emotional resonance separate from their place in life as books. I will only consider those I, singularly, read and purchased and own currently.

The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien - the hard back copies with the full maps -  I have pocket book versions but they would go.

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien  - I have only two pocket book versions, so I would keep the authorized Ballantine copy.

The Cloister Walk by Kathleen Norris ( a pocket book because by this point in my life I could no longer afford the luxury of hardcover books, but her prose is sensual. She is a poet and this is prose as only a poet could write).

Lament for a Nation by George Grant (pocket book, 1963  - again this book opened my mind to thinking philosophically about, well, everything.)

A Political and Cultural History of Europe by Carlton J.H. Hayes (two volumes, hardcover, 1939. This is the first, or at least one of the first histories that presented not just political history, but cultural integrated into the narrative. Hayes wrote in a way all historians should be taught - clearly yet with style.)

Ways of the Christian Mystics by Thomas Merton (this one not only for the clarity of his mystical thought - now there's an oxymoron worth meditation - but because it is in a Shambhala Pocket Classic edition - a true pocket book but using red and black prints and internal borders in the text)


I will stop here.

The Lady and the Unicorn

Tonight I began listening to a CBC podcast on this series of six tapestries in the Musée de Cluny in France. There is a general introduction, then each tapestry is described and highlighted. I sat back in the wing chair in my home office and half closed my eyes to listen and to see with words. I let the producer and the experts he chats with paint the tapestries with their words onto the canvas of my mind.  The images leapt forth. This is what writing should do - take you into another place where images and events become real in your own mind.

The first tapestry - touch - the first five represent the five senses, the sixth goes beyond the senses to a place rejected by atheists, doubted by agnostics and lived in by believers in any religion.  But in this post, it is the first that prompted me to stop the podcast for a bit to write.

Touch.  My poetry and my prose always strives to make touch - texture, feel, physical pleasure, physical pain, surfaces, muscles straining, cold water on hot skin, rough tree bark, silk... live in the minds of readers and in my mind. The discussion of the first tapestry touch,  describes the mediaeval juxtaposition of gentleness and lust, of the soft gentle eyes of the unicorn and its hard, erect horn, of the lion, of the lady, of all the images as occupying two realities in one.

Poetry presents many realities in one set of words. The reader must feel the reality and not worry about the reality of the poet. Prose is much more like this than most suspect. The words that narrate a story draw characters and events in places where the reader colours them, makes them tall or short, builds the country these souls inhabit. They do live in different places for each reader.

http://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/the-lady-and-the-unicorn-1.3398613

Cold Beauty

I awoke today

I awoke today and abandoned writing. I knew in my waking state that I had no talent and no hope. I groaned and rose to meet another day. I drank my first coffee and ate a bagel.  I knew I was a writer now and would push my way through the irrelevancies and annoyances and defeats that are life. I floated now, buoyed only by the need to write and the tantalizing small respites of daily life.

-30-

I lie listening to rain on a roof at the end. Parts of my body ache and hurt. The sound of rain soothes and matches my heart. Life, as the large multitude of those wiser than I have noted, is a funny business. I am an untenable character in this, condemned to see holistically in a place where others do not. I see those walking through this forest of dark and light in all their wonderful complexity while others seem to see only narrow paths. I see dips and curves and sun and rain and warmth and cold that chills the soul. I wonder at this curse visited on me to see the whole.

Round Pegs and Square Holes

   

I am a misfit. There, I said it. I cannot recall a time in my life where I felt easy in this or any place. I observed, quietly. Slowly I learned to build a cone of invisibility about my heart and soul.  I wrote poetry when young. I stopped then began all over when old.  This review of English World War 1 poets  resonates - as it stresses that the misfitery of the poet's heart transcends mere circumstance.

https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=44522

Beginning (my incoherent mind)

The sun glinted on the river. The water’s surface was still, but Simon could see deep currents telling lies about its placid face. The sun felt warm, delighting the cool breeze that touched his body.  He could hear voices, calling, laughing, teasing on the other side.  A house looked out from a balcony, added precariously by a home owner, holding figures happily touching and playing with each other.

I can't decide what to do with this paragraph.  Another story, same character? Or one of the alternate versions of The Man who fell from the Sky'......Hmmmmm....... maybe that's it......hmmmmm

Metadata

Experienced authors know all about metadata. I was only vaguely aware of its use and importance. Mostly I grabbed a few keywords out of the jumbled mess that is my brain because the site or service insisted I fill in their metadata section. On Pinterest I discovered this succinct explication.

I will go back and redo my metadata now.

http://www.thebookdesigner.com/2014/09/7-tips-for-metadata-magic-for-self-publishers/

Thinking in Pictures

While surfing around Facebook today, reading the American Left bashing the American Right and vice versa, I came across an interesting post.  One person had said something to the effect that language is necessary for thought.  I agreed until I read a response which noted that there are cases of individuals who think in pictures.

This got me to considering my poetry.  My poems are word translations of sensations.  At this very moment I am sitting in my home office on a chair that is ramshackle using a desk that was the cheapest of the cheap in 1992. A breeze and sounds are coming in the window and cooling my back and my mind.

soft sounds floated on breezes cool
caressing his back
a thousand little fingers reached through his shirt
he shivered deliciously at such delight

This little prosy poem is an attempt to translate the sensation into words and share it with others.  But I had no 'thoughts' as I felt this sensation - only the sensation. And only poetry can translate 'thinking in sensations' for others to experience.

The Man who fell from the Sky is a long form translation of sensations using words, photos, colours... whatever I can place in the eBook. This means most of the advice blogs from successful authors on how to write or market or package a book are useless, or nearly so, to me.  I am not a good story teller but I am a good sensation translator. Sigh.  A poet I guess with the impoverished lifestyle that comes with that affliction.

Multimedia eBooks and Traditional Publishing

Traditional publishers are attempting to integrate eBooks into their overall publishing program.

 I read Mike Shatzin's blog regularly where these efforts are frequently detailed. His July 23 post was focussed on Amazon and its costs and benefits to both authors and publishers (meaning mostly the big 5, with a nod to small publishers), but a throwaway comment by him on multimedia eBooks caused me to respond. Here is his summary of multimedia eBooks:

Edward, people have been looking for the multiple-media, transmedia, etc. formula for 30 years! Voyager Expanded Books was doing this in 1990. The consumers don't buy, at least not in any numbers. "Successes" have been isolated one-offs. I have been ridiculing the idea for three decades and haven't been proven wrong yet. Someday I may be, I suppose. But in the meantime I will stick to the notion that the straight reading form is extremely hard to improve upon from a commercial perspective. It is both what people actually want AND vastly cheaper to both produce and distribute (smaller file sizes). Good luck with your experimentation, but I hope you enjoy the process because "success" is very unlikely.

My point was that the attempts at multimedia were always ill-advised.  Multimedia meant for publishers producing a standard text only book, then adding in multimedia here and there to 'enhance' the text.  

My idea is that multimedia has to be integral to the experience. I had at this point in our brief exchange a minor epiphany.  Here is what I said:

Hi Mike :
I agree with you actually. I understand that your business is advising publishers, especially in the difficult world of eBooks and the disruption caused by the digital revolution. All I am saying is that multimedia books (with the exception of college textbooks), are not really 'books' at all. I think the chances of earning money are virtually nil - that multimedia eBooks are more akin to works of art than books to be read. I can imagine a world where the sort of agent who represents a painter also handles multimedia eBooks and you find them in art shows and galleries, not bookstores, electronic or bricks and mortar. The exception of textbooks is where I do not understand what is happening, or rather not happening. I teach History and freshman sophomore textbooks are already and have been for many years print versions of multimedia - photographs, textboxes, text, footnotes, links. Columbia University Press and the American Historical Society teamed up to produce multimedia eBooks, but they were stupidly expensive to produce and to sell, which I do not understand. One of my projects is to produce such a book, using Apple's free software. There you might see me, someday.

His short reply said it all:  Complex media can make complete sense for teaching purposes. They just don't have much mass commercial appeal.  

Mike Shatzkin has been in the book business for many, many years as was his father.  His bread and butter is advising traditional publishers on means to navigate the digitization of text only mass market books.  He and  his industry are blind to anything else. Perhaps he is correct that no decent living can be made from this, but I think he is blind to the future

The Art of Fiction from The Paris Review

Some time ago I began to read articles published in The Paris Review that were posted on Facebook - when I have the money I will subscribe as I have found plenty I wish to read carefully and with some joy.  They have been running a series called The Art of Fiction.  Today I am racing through No. 18, an interview by George Plimpton (one of the journal's founders) of Ernest Hemingway.  It seems that the working style of successful writers has no common factors other than they write every day.

Here is a quote which caught my attention:

“that though there is one part of writing that is solid and you do it no harm by talking about it, the other is fragile, and if you talk about it, the structure cracks and you have nothing.”

This caught my eye. If I spend any time talking about writing technique, that is time I do not spend writing.  I have little enough space in my hectic life as it is and cannot afford to squander what  I can manage. 

Here is the link:

Plimpton interviews Hemingway