[Image: animated GIF (five loops) of a brief clip from the film Miller’s Crossing (1990). Why five loops? Well, I had to stop somewhere! The original version of this GIF looped endlessly, which might be fun/interesting as a meme-type image on a social media platform, but looked ridiculous — compulsive and twitchy — when spread across a canvas this grand. Heh.]
Per tradition, here’s a playlist to start off my anniversary post this year. It’s the soundtrack from — yes! — Miller’s Crossing. (Tempting to select just track #3, for obvious reasons, but this is the whole thing.)
The very first post here on Running After My Hat laid out what — as I prematurely imagined — the blog would be “about”: a series of booklets I’d originally written as Christmas gifts for my family. In fairly short order, I added posts providing further information about the background of these little things, such as this one about the real-world town which provided the setting for the books’ accounts of growing up there.
Well, things happened (as things, yes, tend to do). I kept revisiting the How It Was stories, in my head and on the blog. When such a thing became possible, I experimented with turning the booklets into e-booklets, for distribution to a wider audience. But these experiments never quite got off the ground…
…until recently.
Mainly, and outwardly, this newfound effort was driven by my rediscovering a cache of short stories I’d written over the course of some 25 years. (Of course, this rediscovery itself had to wait until The Missus and I finally settled down somewhere after our two years’ rambling around the country, post-COVID lockdown, and started unpacking boxes.) After about four months of modestly revamping and reformatting the stories — to say nothing of banging my head against the whole “make an e-book, and then make a REAL book” learning curve, those stories are now available via Amazon either in Kindle-readable format or in print (paperback) editions of two anthologies. Yes, that’s a photo of the “author’s proof” editions of the paperbacks at right. (The gray bands across the covers do not appear in the books as finally printed.)
The links below take you to Amazon’s pages for the paperback editions; once there, you can if you want opt for the eBook (Kindle) version — and regardless of format, there are several pages of sample text available:
- Webster, Unabridged: a half-dozen tales featuring the same protagonist — occasionally mistaken for the author — known only as Webster.
- Left-Handed Inventions: a full dozen stories — different characters, different genres, different “voices,” and so on.
…all of which has led me to visit — again — the notion of “publishing” the How It Was series. I should have more on that front sometime in the next few months.
In the meantime…
You probably know already of the Substack platform for making one’s writing available to wider audiences — basically, a form of what we’ve always called blogging, with some 21st-century accoutrements (easy subscriptions — paid or free; easily managed mailing lists and commenting systems; “Share” buttons and the like).
Substack first made its way into my consciousness because they’d signed up some “big names”: Garrison Keillor, for instance, and Salman Rushdie, and novel/short-story author George Saunders. It’s a very simple platform both for posting occasional writings and for reading them: more restrictive than, say, a WordPress blog in terms of what you can do besides post writing there, and in terms of the look-and-feel of your site, but yes, much much simpler.
Anyway, long story short, I set up a Substack site — also called Running After My Hat — back in November. As you can see, I haven’t really figured out (or “decided”) what exactly I’m doing there as well as here. The things I’ve posted there are original, not duplicates of what’s here… on the other hand, there was no particular reason why I didn’t post them here instead. They’re pretty much RAMH posts in Substack garb.
But of course they’re not identical, except superficially. “Under the hood,” a post on Substack (vs. on a WordPress blog) is more likely to be read by a wider variety of new folks, because of the easy subscribe-and-share features.
I don’t expect to abandon RAMH-the-original for the new platform; I hope eventually to figure out a way to keep both healthy and familiar to the people used to reading them, without cross-posting duplication.
But the main reason I’m bringing it up now is because of a series called “The Fiction Garage.” (The series as a whole is collected here.) It doesn’t get into the nuts-and-bolts of self-publishing on Amazon, but it does lay out the general outline (for now) of how and why the two anthologies — Webster, Unabridged and Left-Handed Inventions — came into being. At some point, I hope to add a related series on getting How It Was (subtitle: The Boy’s Year) into print as well.
Which will sorta bring the whole “running after my How It Was” saga full circle.
In the meantime (again) I’m glad you — whoever you are* — are here, reading this. Thank you for 16 years’ attention, however intermittent or steady!
[Yes, I know — corny and obvious, maybe. But surely I’m entitled!]
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* “Whoever you are*, haha. Right. I probably know who you are — among others, thank you for your years of reading, especially: Cynth and Michael (someone’s bruther); Marta; Paul in Southeast Asia and Susan in Italy; and a bunch of people who may still be putting in silent appearances from time to time: Nance, Misssy, Jayne, Squirrel, whaddayameantheresnodessert… the list is endless! And it goes without saying, maybe, but thank you as well to my anonymous (because, really, unknown) source of weekly blogging inspiration: the always thoughtful, always challenging whiskey river — hard to imagine RAMH without that mysterious hat blowing by the window and pulling me outside every few days.
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