The Online World

Too Many Answers to Stop

March 8, 2014 by John Leave a Comment

I’ve long held that a story I’ve started writing must reach a certain “critical mass” in order for me to carry it through to completion. This critical mass might be defined as the written length — the word/page count — beyond which I will not, can not stop writing. A story which might become a novella (or longer), for instance, seems to hit critical mass at about 10,000 words. At this point, the narrative has so much momentum in my head that it’s a force in its own right: I know enough about the characters and the story to know how little I really know about them, and how much I want to find out.

(I’m pretty sure many/most other writers feel the same way, incidentally, although we’ve probably all got different critical masses.)

Mostly, this is just a descriptive figure, not a prescriptive one. It’s an observation which seems to have held true in the past and (as I expect) will likely hold true in the future, not a make-or-break target.

For the piece I’m working on now, though, I seem to be approaching — perhaps have already crossed — a different and perhaps unquantifiable threshold: a critical mass of research.
[Read more…]

Counter-Existence

January 10, 2014 by John 2 Comments

[Images: Original (as far as I can determine) on the left; as often circulated/reposted on social-media sites, on the right. (Click either for a larger version.) While both carry meanings I appreciate, it’s interesting — if unsurprising — that the original seems to have made much less of an impression on people.]

From whiskey river:

Wake up in the morning and say to yourself, “I do not exist now, I have never existed previously, and I will never exist in the future.” When your mind is calm in the morning hours when you awaken, you say something like this, you will get a beautiful warm good feeling. You will feel wonderful, for it relieves you of the responsibility of taking care of yourself to an extent. You will still take care of yourself, but it’ll be completely different. You will brush your teeth, you will take a shower, you will go to work, you will eat breakfast. Yet when you feel that you do not exist, you are totally free from the reactions to the things that are going on. There is no one to react any longer. Therefore, everything that appears to be done by you, will be done in a wonderful way, all the time knowing that you are not the doer.

I know the teaching sounds absurd to most people. Yet this is the teaching that has been propagated by rishis, sages, since the beginning of time. This is it. This is your opportunity to awaken. Why not use it? Do not let another moment go by where you’re sitting there and believing and thinking something is wrong somewhere.

(Robert Adams [quoted at various sites around the Web — no specific source as far as I can tell])

…and:

To the Hand

What the eye sees is a dream of sight
what it wakes to
is a dream of sight

and in the dream
for every real lock
there is only one real key
and it’s in some other dream
now invisible

it’s the key to the one real door
it opens the river and the sky both at once
it’s already in the downward river
with my hand on it
my real hand

and I am saying to the hand
turn

open the river

(W. S. Merwin [source])

…and:

Staying very still in the darkness, I became less and less convinced of the fact that I actually existed.

(Haruki Murakami [source])

[Read more…]

An E-Publishing Experiment (2): Short Holiday Reading for Under a Buck

December 1, 2013 by John 7 Comments

Moving right along…

So I’ve had a short story for sale for a week so far, as described in this post. (The book itself can be found on Amazon.com; that’s the Amazon US link, although it’s also available at the company’s UK, Australia, Brazil, Germany, India, [etc.] sites.) At 99 cents apiece (less Amazon’s cut), I’ve sold about a dozen copies of that story to date (one was “refunded,” for reasons unknown — probably a double download).

As I mentioned at the time, I haven’t really done anything to promote it, other than to announce its availability on Facebook and Twitter. I did a follow-up on Facebook, a day or two later, and — for what it’s worth — sold more copies via the follow-up than from the original announcement. I made a point of not urging anyone to spread the word, buy copies for friends and family, and so on; I just announced the story’s availability, to see what happened next.

From this small chunk of data, so far at least, I (not very earth-shakingly) conclude:

People who see the announcement are more likely to respond to it. Thus, the timing of the announcement is critical: almost no one can read every single posting in his or her Facebook and/or Twitter feeds. Follow-up can greatly announcements improve the odds of likely purchasers even knowing about the sale in the first place.
Since Facebook and Twitter (and RAMH itself, for that matter) are self-selected population samples — only people who “know” me in one way or another — presumably all of those dozen sales so far came not via word-of-mouth, but in direct response to the announcement.

I don’t know how to encourage word-of-mouth sales without constantly nudging the people who’ve bought it so far — remember, people I “know” — and risking wearing out my welcome, so to speak. Especially now, at this time of year, people (even generous friends) simply don’t want, let alone need, to be badgered repeatedly to buy something.

So, let’s move on to phase 2, applying some of these lessons (and leaving some of the mysteries unresolved for now).

You can find my next 99-cent offering here, at Amazon’s US site: “How It Was: Christmas.” If you’ve been reading RAMH for a while, you’ve seen this (both the overall series, and this specific volume) referenced before. One of my very first posts here described the series’ genesis, and what to expect from the individual booklets.

Of all four books, this one is most likely to “sell,” I think — especially at this time of year. I’ve done a couple of things to open it up a little further:

I’ve enrolled the title in Amazon’s ~~“Kindle Select”~~ “KDP Select” program. This will provide me some promotional opportunities downstream. Chief among these: I will be able to RAISE the sale price, with the intention of immediately offering it for sale at a deep discount back to the 99-cents level.
The book will also be available for free “library” lending to Amazon Prime customers. I won’t get a direct royalty from these so-called borrowings, but I will get a small bit from some kind of Amazon’s global library promotions.
I’ll do more than one follow-up announcement on Facebook, and also make a point of following up a couple of times on Twitter. (As ever, I don’t want to wear out my welcome. If anyone sees me approaching that limit, I hope you’ll let me know!)
A bigger risk, maybe: I’m offering the book free of all digital-rights-management constraints. This means that someone who BUYS a copy can simply turn around and give the book file to anyone else. Of everything I’ve written, maybe, this Christmas booklet is “most likely to succeed,” at some point (perhaps years in the future). To the extent that more and more people read (and of course like) it, future sales of both other How It Was books and everything else I might e-publish might get a boost.

Again, let’s just see how things play out. And I’ll report back on this phase, too, at some point.

Thanks as always for reading anything at all which I’ve written… and of course, thanks extra if you’ve paid for it, and/or encouraged someone else to do so. ;)

An E-Publishing Experiment: Short Fiction for Under a Buck

November 23, 2013 by John 1 Comment

I am not even close to the first person to wonder: is it possible — let alone worthwhile — to sell short short stories piecemeal, directly to readers, without going through the intermediary of a magazine or publisher?

Answering the first part of that question comes (relatively) easily, as it happens. Pursuing the answer to the second, however, can be messier. More… fraught.

So, the experiment:

I’ve uploaded a short story to Amazon, where it will sell as an e-“book” for 99¢ (US) and the equivalent price in other currencies. If I could have, I’d have priced it even lower; for now, though, that represents the lowest price which Amazon even allows for an e-book. Still, I have no plans to lower the price later. Let’s just see how it goes.

What do you need to know about the story?

The cover appears at the top right of this post; the title, obviously, is “Atmospheres.”
Genre? Fiction, of course. Maybe literary fiction (although that does carry an unseemly whiff of self-congratulation, doesn’t it?). Some might consider it to be a fantasy. A, well… let’s say a light contemporary fantasy. Don’t expect any pixies or elves, however, nor dragons, trolls, wizards, and the rest of that lot.
Excerpt: here’s how it begins…

Nathan DeKuyper had often dreamed of flying — not in some engined or lighter-than-air contraption, but personally, on his own. Springing-into-the-air flying. Aerodynamically-stretched-out-extremities flying, like Superman, requiring no wings of his own nor flapping of arms. Propelled in three dimensions by mere intent, by wanting to be there instead of here. Gliding, climbing, barrel rolling, power diving, treetop skimming, with the wind threatening to strip his glasses from his head, his eyes tearing, his hearing aid clattering dangerously, his clothes snapping and ballooning about him. No one would see him, or if they saw him they’d look away, rub their eyes, look up again… but he’d be gone by then, already dismissed as an illusion, all but forgotten.

Of course he had dreamed of flying. Hadn’t everyone? But — well, of course — he’d never actually flown.

Until the day he did.

How short is it? (Regular readers of my prose here and elsewhere may especially need reassurance on this score.) Only about 7,000 words: easily consumed at a sitting, I think (hope).
As an e-book sold through Amazon, it’s in Kindle-readable format. However — this is important — you do not need a Kindle to read it. Once you purchase it, you should be able to read it with Amazon’s Kindle software, available both as a regular Web browser plug-in and as a smartphone/tablet app.
Oh, duh: where to get it. Of course. You can get it here.

As I said, let’s just see how it goes. I’ll mention the whole thing on Facebook and Twitter, maybe even more than once, but have no “promotional” plans beyond that — word-of-mouth will carry it, or it won’t. And yes, I’ll report back on the whole thing. Sometime, haha.

Reimagining the World

November 22, 2013 by John 8 Comments

[Image: “Imagination,” one of a series posted on Flickr by Inara Pey. (Click image for full-size original.) The images in this set are all digital creations — scenes from the Second Life alternate-universe “game”/virtual world. See Pey’s blog post about it for more information. Image used under a Creative Commons license.]

From whiskey river:

Imagination can so easily be trapped by the wish to escape painful facts and unbearable conclusions. The New Age idea that one can wish oneself out of any circumstance, disease, or bad fortune is not only sadly disrespectful toward suffering, it is also, in the end, dangerous if escape replaces awareness.

At the same time, the act of seeing changes those who see. This is perhaps most clear with self-perception. By my perceptions of who I am or what I feel, not only do I re-create my idea of who I am but I also change myself. Perception is not simply a reflection of reality but a powerful element of reality. Anyone who meditates has had this experience: Observing the activities of the mind changes the mind until, bit by bit, observation creates great changes in the soul. And the effect is the same when the act of perception is collective. A change in public perception will change the public. This is why acts of imagination are so important.

Like artistic and literary movements, social movements are driven by imagination. I am not speaking here only of the songs and poems and paintings that have always been part of movements for political and social change, but of the movements themselves, their political ideas and forms of protest. Every important social movement reconfigures the world in the imagination. What was obscure comes forward, lies are revealed, memory shaken, new delineations drawn over the old maps: it is from this new way of seeing the present that hope for the future emerges.

(Susan Griffin [source])

…and:

Love brings something inside you to life. Perhaps it is just the full dimensionality of your own capacity to feel that returns. In this state you think no impediment can be large enough to interrupt your passion. The feeling spills beyond the object of your love to color the whole world. The mood is not unlike the mood of revolutionaries in the first blush of victory, at the dawn of hope. Anything seems possible.

(Susan Griffin [source])

…and:

Uley, Glos

The moonlight is suddenly large:
a brightness on the fields that only shows
when this house dims
and something clearer rises
through the parish I know by heart, bricks and glass, the dead
immersed in stone,
subtle erasures, siftings of blood and bone,
as if this was the story of a place
that I could tell without impediment:
first thought, then form, a drift of native souls
scattered across the land like seed or snow,
ordered and lost; a sieve of consciousness
the making of this commonplace domain:
respected borders, marriages and births,
the giving up and taking on of names.

(John Burnside [source])

[Read more…]

Skimming Tangentially Against the Agented Universe, and the Scriptwriting One

October 31, 2013 by John 3 Comments

[Don’t read too much into this RAMH post’s title.]

Last night, I and 40+ others participated in an interesting webinar called Agent Reads the Slush Pile. It lasted from 8pm Eastern time until close to 10:30. Each of about forty authors submitted the first two pages of a manuscript, including as “identifying” information only the title and genre — i.e., no names. Each of these mini-manuscripts was assigned a random number, which determined the order in which they’d be read. And then the agent… well, the agent read them. Commenting as she went. The idea was to reproduce, aloud, what it was like for an agent to just dive into a batch of unsolicited manuscripts. (And to answer the unspoken question: no, she hadn’t seen any of the submissions in advance.)

How it worked, more precisely: an agent at the agency read the mini-MSS aloud, one at a time, while the lead agent moderated her progress through the reading with little instructions like, “Okay, stop right there for a second…” and “Okay, pick up at the next paragraph.” At each point of interruption or discontinuity she’d point out something like a pattern of word choices or details which were helping (or, more often, hurting) the story at this point. (Considering that it’s the first two pages of a novel, one definitely wants not to include anything like impediments.)

We also had plenty of opportunities to ask questions, which didn’t need to be restricted to the reading/critiques.

I won’t get into details of the critiques. But I will say that it all drove home to me the importance of three precepts, as if you don’t already know these things:

Choose your genre well and carefully.
Choose the details you include — also both well and carefully.
Rewrite, rewrite, rewrite.

[Read more…]

Mark This Moment

August 30, 2013 by John 4 Comments

[Image: partial screen capture of a page at Google Books. The worker scanning the pages of The Coquette has allowed his or her gloved finger to be recorded for posterity.]

From whiskey river (italicized portion):

You will lose everything. Your money, your power, your fame, your success, perhaps even your memories. Your looks will go. Loved ones will die. Your body will fall apart. Everything that seems permanent is impermanent and will be smashed. Experience will gradually, or not so gradually, strip away everything that it can strip away. Waking up means facing this reality with open eyes and no longer turning away.

But right now, we stand on sacred and holy ground, for that which will be lost has not yet been lost, and realising this is the key to unspeakable joy. Whoever or whatever is in your life right now has not yet been taken away from you. This may sound trivial, obvious, like nothing, but really it is the key to everything, the why and how and wherefore of existence. Impermanence has already rendered everything and everyone around you so deeply holy and significant and worthy of your heartbreaking gratitude.

Loss has already transfigured your life into an altar.

(Jeff Foster [source])

…and:

The Good Life

You stand at the window.
There is a glass cloud in the shape of a heart.
The wind’s sighs are like caves in your speech.
You are the ghost in the tree outside.

The street is quiet.
The weather, like tomorrow, like your life,
is partially here, partially up in the air.
There is nothing you can do.

The good life gives no warning.
It weathers the climates of despair
and appears, on foot, unrecognized, offering nothing,
and you are there.

(Mark Strand [source])

[Read more…]

Barbara Stanwyck, Crime of Passion, and What Goes on (and Doesn’t) Behind the Eyes

July 20, 2013 by John 12 Comments

Note: This is a detailed recap and review of a film now nearly 60 years old: I’m not going to be coy about spoilers (including stills from the film). If you don’t want to know what happens, I encourage you to stop reading right now. Every blogger loves getting readers, but only a bad — or deeply ignorant — blogger wants to anger them. Be sure to visit Aubyn Eli’s Girl with the White Parasol blog for much more about Barbara Stanwyck this week.

Barbara Stanwyck differed from most (all?) of her contemporaries in at least one regard: onscreen, she never seemed conscious of herself.

Much though I love Bette Davis, say, I can’t quite imagine her in a role in which she’s unaware of her — Bette Davis’s, not the character’s — own greatness, her superiority (on almost every scale) to everyone within a half-mile. She might dismiss it, she might crack wise about it, but in doing so she couldn’t help acknowledging and drawing your attention to it. Katherine Hepburn I’ll watch in anything, and I’ll laugh at or be heartwrenched by almost everything that issues forth from that Philadelphia Mainline throat. But Hepburn herself, although apparently modest in real life and dismissive of flattery, always radiated unapproachability by mere mortals. The planes of her face weren’t the only things those famous cheekbones cleft into separate regions of life.

But even when playing a character utterly out of the league of everyone around her, Stanwyck’s manner just said: Here I am. Take it or leave it. You’ve got your life, I’ve got mine, maybe they’ll intersect and maybe they won’t, and while I’m happy and maybe even delighted to meet you, I’ll survive if I never do.

In 1956’s Crime of Passion, she brings this manner to a role out of sync with the time.

[Read more…]

A Barbara Stanwyck Blogathon

July 20, 2013 by John Leave a Comment

'Barbara Stanwyck Blogathon' banner I don’t know Aubyn Eli and am not sure how I got to her blog, The Girl with the White Parasol, as I did for the first time back in May or June. But I know what attracted me there: her planned week-long celebration of Barbara Stanwyck’s 106th birthday. Later today I’ll add my own contribution to the blogathon: a review of Crime of Passion, from 1956.

Interested in “golden era” Hollywood films or, of course, in Stanwyck herself? You could do far worse this weekend than to set aside some time to browse Aubyn’s schedule of what’s already been posted by the forty-plus bloggers contributing — and to mark your calendars for what’s coming. Not all of Stanwyck’s eighty-plus films are covered (hmm: a foreshadowing of a 107th-birthday celebration in 2014?), but it’s a pretty impressive list nonetheless. And it covers not just her films, either. You’ll find essays on her TV work, her career, the blonde wig she donned for Double Indemnity, the gown (pictured at right) which inflamed Gary Cooper (and not a few male moviegoers) in Ball of Fire…

(Wikipedia says of that film’s wardrobe: “In World War II, a total of 12 servicemen were pen-pals with Stanwyck; two of them asked for a poster of her in the Ball of Fire outfit for their mess hall.”)

As for Aubyn herself, as I said, I know her only (and only very recently) through her blog, which focuses on “Classic Cinema, 1930-1965.” (Her Twitter profile identifies her as a “Full-time fantasist.” I want that job!)

But I do know what the blog’s title alludes to: an anecdote related by Everett Sloane’s character, named Bernstein, in Citizen Kane. He’s being interviewed by a reporter, Thompson, about his memories of Charles Foster Kane (Bernstein having been Kane’s long-time assistant). Thompson asks for Bernstein’s guess about the famous last word, “Rosebud,” and Bernstein suggests maybe it was a girl. Thompson scoffs — anyone so powerful could hardly have had just a girl on his mind at the very end — but Bernstein cuts him off with this story:

It’s one of my favorite moments in the film, actually in any film — one of the favorites of a lot of people, indeed. Of course Aubyn Eli isn’t suggesting a connection specifically with Stanwyck in her blog title, and I never saw a film in which Stanwyck was costumed in exactly this way. But I can confidently say that if I’d ever seen her as a young woman in a white dress with a white parasol over her shoulder, in any setting at all, yeah: I’d remember the moment at least once a month, too.

Anyway, I’ll be back later today with my writeup on Crime of Passion. [Edit to add: the review is here.]

________________

About the blogathon banner image: Wikipedia says of it only, “Barbara Stanwyck as a Ziegfeld girl (c. 1924).”

Aside: I’m so sorry that the video’s uploader didn’t get the memo about properly sizing a clip’s aspect ratio on YouTube. This squashed look drives me crazy.

Gobsmacked by Natural History

July 16, 2013 by John 7 Comments

[Image: Cover of The Golden Treasury of Natural History, by Bertha Morris Parker. Colors tinkered with a little to match its present look as closely as possible.]

A holiday, a small bedroom in a small house, The Boy, The Book…

I don’t know what triggered the recent obsession, but something must have. Not that I’ve ever really forgotten its object; years ago, I started referring to it this way: possibly the best book anyone ever gave me. I’m not kidding myself, or you: it may not be the best-written, the book I most wish I myself had written, even my favorite book. My original copy got swallowed up into Book Heaven long ago, and I had not (until recently) laid eyes on another copy for maybe forty or more years. But for its long-term impact on me — its staying power in my head — nothing else comes close.

It came to me as a Christmas present when I must have been, oh, maybe nine or ten years old. (It certainly feels like I’ve known it that long.) Dad had always held blue-collar jobs, and Mom — when she eventually went to work (as opposed to, haha, the sheer non-working pleasure of raising four kids) — held secretarial and clerical positions. So we never had anything you could call superficially “privileged.” But at Christmas, they annually went overboard. We got so much stuff.

In retrospect, I wonder if at that time of year they might have been just throwing things at the walls of our minds to see what would stick. I know they loved us — never once doubted it, even — but they’d had little if anything like training or orientation as parents. We were like four aliens deposited in their household: total strangers, maybe even only nominally of the same species. How could they entertain us? Would we like music, maybe? (Get them an LP!) Would we want to become homemakers, or mechanics? (Get them a toy oven, or a garage — made of finger-slashing tin in case they want to become surgeons!) Artists? (A Play-Do factory! a watercolor paints set! colored pencils! crayons and coloring books! heck, throw in a jigsaw puzzle! All in the same year!)

So this one year — again, I think somewhere between third and fifth grade — I found (among the rubble of childhood avarice) two books for me: both non-fiction, both about science. One was a large-format hardcover book, maybe 9″ x 12″, maybe fifty pages long,, entirely about astronomy. I don’t remember many specifics about that book — certainly not the title. It had no paper dust cover. The front, spine, and back were of some ultra-high-gloss material; the predominant color was deep navy blue, scattered with stars. Of all the sciences, astronomy has held my attention the most, and I think to that book must belong a great deal of the credit.

But the other book: ah, the other book. That was the unforgettable one.

[Read more…]