Running After My Hat

Only You, and You Alone

December 20, 2013 by John Leave a Comment

'only you can touch me this way,' by user kygp on Flickr

[Image: “only you can touch me this way,” by user kygp (Elisa Dudnikova) on Flickr. (Used under a Creative Commons license; thank you!) That thing which looks like an aerial? I believe it’s called a “snow lance,” used for making snow. (See the stuff spraying from the tip? Wikipedia has more information, including a photo of another one.)]

From whiskey river:

Stop worrying about your identity and concern yourself with the people you care about, ideas that matter to you, beliefs you can stand by, tickets you can run on. Intelligent humans make those choices with their brain and hearts and they make them alone. The world does not deliver meaning to you. You have to make it meaningful, and decide what you want and need and must do. It’s a tough, unimaginably lonely and complicated way to be in the world. But that’s the deal: you have to live; you can’t live by slogans, dead ideas, clichés, or national flags. Finding an identity is easy. It’s the easy way out.

(Zadie Smith [source (in slightly different words)])

…and:

It Took Time

This is a poem about
how you never get the kiss you want
when you want it,

how time twines around your neck, its thorns
digging into your skin so you can never forget
how clinging to a string of hope, threading it
between your spine, and having it unravel before you
in the span of an hour
is worse than any metaphor on nakedness
that you poets will ever write.

This is my reflection in the mirror. This stanza
is the small gap where my fingers try to touch against
the glass.

You can’t even possess yourself; let alone the person
you see standing before you.

The moon
hasn’t come back from the cleaners yet
and I have nothing to slip into tonight that makes my reflection feel
beautiful.

Time is falling through the holes in my pocket. January
is coming soon, and I have a feeling he’s never going to fall
out of love with December.

He’ll still write her love letters. He’ll send her
white orchids on every lonely holiday and pretend that love too
is a place you can cross state lines to get back to,

but it’s that time of the year again, and
calendar sales keep reminding us all that we can never get back
to where we once wanted so bad to lose ourselves in
for good.

(Shinji Moon [source])

[Read more…]

Midweek Science/Poetry Break: Diane Ackerman, “Night Letter to Loren Eiseley”

December 18, 2013 by John Leave a Comment

Jaguar of Sweet Laughter, by Diane Ackerman Correct: no Midweek Music Break this week. I’ve been working on this year’s ~~Quirky~~ Eclectic Christmas Mix, which will show up here on Saturday, so am a little burnt out on music at the moment. :)

Instead…

I’ve been re-reading Carl Sagan’s Broca’s Brain, from 1979, which deals mostly with the edges which lie between science and, well, everything else. In one chapter, he discusses science fiction: what he likes and what he hates about it. And I came across this curious claim: “…in the verse of Diane Ackerman can be glimpsed the prospect of a mature astronomical poetry, fully conversant with standard science-fiction themes.”

Eh? I thought. Diane Ackerman writes science-fiction poetry?!? This turns out to be the case, all right — or at least, she has done so. I refer you to her collection called Jaguar of Sweet Laughter, for example, which includes (among much else) excerpt from a complete cycle, ~~perhaps~~ a collection of its own, called The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral.

In Jaguar of Sweet Laughter, I also came across the poem below. Not strictly speaking a “science-fiction poem,” nevertheless it does feature an imagined correspondence with one of the great workers at those edges between science and “everything else.”

Night Letter to Loren Eiseley

All night an illness barred me
from that loam-rich sleep
we mammals are born to,
we who lie flat for eight hours
in darkness, then rise, barely rested,
for half a sun, watch color TV
because ancestors had eyes cued
to ripening fruit, laze on platforms
in the sun, and still marvel
at hand-me-down miracles like birth.

Near dawn, I took your Immense Journey
from the shelf, and found myself soon
with lantern-jawed humans, trapped
in the Lost Horizon of our past,
with deft orb-weavers, oracular fish,
and marsh birds that stilt
from pond to pond. Then, nodding
in ricochet delight, I feasted
on the spellbinding fruit you grew—
that way of beholding
which is a form of prayer,
and, on the still white winter morning,
knew I would carry its seeds
to an unworldly place.

(Diane Ackerman [source])

The Clarity of Surprise

December 13, 2013 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Sign in Woods,” by user dibytes (Diane Hammond) on Flickr. Used under a Creative Commons License. For more information, see the photographer’s note on the photo’s Flickr page.]

From whiskey river:

The Reverse Side
The reverse side also has a reverse side — Japanese proverb

It’s why when we speak a truth
some of us instantly feel foolish
as if a deck inside us has been shuffled
and there it is—the opposite
of what we said.

And perhaps why as we fall in love
we’re already falling out of it.

It’s why the terrified and the simple
latch onto one story,
just one version of the great mystery.

Image & afterimage, oh even
the open-minded yearn for a fiction
to rein things in—
the snapshot, the lie of the frame.

How do we not go crazy,
we who have found ourselves compelled
to live with the circle, the ellipsis, the word
not yet written.

(Stephen Dunn [source])

…and (italicized portion):

…“astonishing” is an epithet concealing a logical trap. We’re astonished, after all, by things that deviate from some well-known and universally acknowledged norm, from an obviousness we’ve grown accustomed to. Now the point is, there is no such obvious world. Our astonishment exists per se and isn’t based on comparison with something else.

Granted, in daily speech, where we don’t stop to consider every word, we all use phrases like “the ordinary world,” “ordinary life,” “the ordinary course of events” … But in the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone’s existence in this world.

It looks like poets will always have their work cut out for them.

(Wislawa Szymborska [source])

…and:

There are moments when a kind of clarity comes over you, and suddenly you can see through walls to another dimension that you’d forgotten or chosen to ignore in order to continue living with the various illusions that make life, particularly life with other people, possible.

(Nicole Krauss [source])

[Read more…]

Midweek Music Break: She Her & I: “Everybody Loves My Baby”

December 11, 2013 by John Leave a Comment

“Everybody Loves My Baby” has been bouncing around in pop music for a long time. First recorded in 1924 by Clarence Williams’s Blue Five (featuring a young cornetist named Louis Armstrong, who did not sing at all in this version), it seems to be rediscovered every ten years or so. The lyrics change according to the singer’s gender, but the preferred presentation features one woman singer — or a group of them — playing against a hopping, hot-jazz accompaniment.

About the comma-eschewing trio named She Her & I, unfortunately, I can tell you almost nothing. Their Web site includes no “About” page; a brief paragraph on the home pages says only:

Straight out of the zeitgeist, SHE HER & I is a vintage-meets-modern cocktail of tight harmonies, hot jazz, and big band and gypsy swing.

I think that “gypsy swing” phrase (whatever it means) probably helped me decide to feature them today. In their video performances I’ve seen, they come across as at once flirtatious and slightly scary (of course, I’m easily scared), and they can really sing as well as swing.

Facebook is a bit more informative, however:

Description
Inspired by the Boswell Sisters, Django Reinhardt, Duke Ellington, Etta James, The Andrews Sisters and the fervent joy of New Orleans vintage jazz…

Band Interests
jazz, swing, swagger

Artists We Also Like
Boswell Sisters, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, Django Reinhardt, Duke Ellington, Glenn Miller Orchestra, The Andrews Sisters, Oh dear… the list is long…

(A little poking around there finally uncovered their names: Francesca Vannucci, Corrie Shenigo and Alisa Burket. It also reveals that both their record label and their booking agent is someone — or something — named “Belle Aesthete.”)

I can tell you, unambiguously, that I first discovered She Her & I via another performer’s video of a completely different song. Which performer, which video, which song? Patience, Grasshopper. (All will be revealed in the fullness of time, which according to my watch will be in about ~~ten days~~ ~~a week~~ no, ten days after all.)

[Below, click Play button to begin Everybody Loves My Baby. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 2:54 long.]

[audio:everybodylovesmybaby_sheherandi.mp3|titles=’Everybody Loves My Baby’|artists=She Her & I]

“Everybody Loves My Baby” has been covered by a good range of artists, with a good range of personal styles. (The Andrews Sisters — actually Boswell Sisters — approach seems to predominate.) Most recently, it made a pretty big splash when featured in the HBO series Boardwalk Empire. Wikipedia devotes an entire rather painful paragraph to a parsing of the lyrics, especially their grammatical ambiguities which apparently drive some people crazy. (Not least, one suspects, some people who edit Wikipedia articles.)

For contrast, here’s the first recording, by Clarence Williams’s Blue Five (including Eva Taylor’s vocals and, again, Louis Armstrong on the cornet):

Finally, a side note: Doris Day may be the only singer to have performed both “Everybody Loves My Baby” (definitely not the “good girl” Doris Day of the stereotype) and “Everybody Loves a Lover.” I don’t believe the songs are otherwise connected (but always welcome surprises (well, some of them)).

Infinitely More Than Meets the Eye

December 6, 2013 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Infinity Mirror Room,” by user ®DS on Flickr. If you’ve got a fast Internet connection, you’ll want to click on it to see the full-scale panorama — it’s 4.6MB in size. (Right-click and open it in a new window for best results.) For more information, see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river (answer to #4):

The universe—some information to help you live in it.

AREA: Infinite.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy offers this definition of the word “Infinite.”
Infinite: Bigger than the biggest thing ever and then some. Much bigger than that in fact, really amazingly immense, a totally stunning size, real “wow, that’s big,” time. Infinity is just so big that by comparison, bigness itself looks really titchy. Gigantic multiplied by colossal multiplied by staggeringly huge is the sort of concept we’re trying to get across here.

IMPORTS: None.
It is impossible to import things into an infinite area, there being no outside to import things in from.

EXPORTS: None.
See Imports.

POPULATION: None.
It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.

MONETARY UNITS: None.
In fact, there are three freely convertible currencies in the universe, but the Altairian Dollar has recently collapsed, the Flainian Pobble Bead is only exchangeable for other Flainian Pobble Beads, and the Triganic Pu has its own special problems. Its exchange rate of eight Ningis to one Pu is simple enough, but since a Ningi is a triangular rubber coin six thousand eight hundred miles along each side, no one has ever collected enough to own one Pu. Niginis are not negotiable currency, because the Galactibanks refuse to deal in fiddling small change. From this basic premise it is very simple to prove that the Galactibanks are also the products of a deranged imagination.

(Douglas Adams [source])

…and:

Snow

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes —
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one’s hands —
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

(Louis MacNeice [source])

[Read more…]

Midweek Music Break: Miles Davis, Soundtrack to Ascenseur Pour L’Echafaud

December 4, 2013 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: Jeanne Moreau and Miles Davis]

A couple of days ago I ran across this list of (according to the Guardian) the “Top Ten Film Noir.” It was an interesting selection; I couldn’t recall seeing a a few of them, and one — #7 on the list, 1958’s Lift to the Scaffold — I couldn’t remember even hearing of. Said the Guardian:

Louis Malle’s first fiction feature, based on Noel Calef’s 1956 novel, occupies a very interesting space. It qualifies as film noir for its appropriation of US postwar cinema in its tale of lovers gone bad, but also heralds the imminent arrival of the French new wave. The director was in his mid-20s at the time and clearly using the crime-thriller genre (something he never returned to) as a testing ground and not a strict template. Perhaps that explains why his film is such a melting pot of influences, drawing not only on Hitchcock but also the Master of Suspense’s overseas admirers, including Henri-Georges Clouzot and his Les Diaboliques.

…in the film’s signature sequence [Jeanne Moreau’s character, Florence’s] man fails to turn up, so she walks the streets trying vainly to find him. Filmed on the fly without professional lighting, accompanied only by Miles Davis’s brilliant, melancholy score, these few minutes capture the bleak and beautiful essence of Malle’s film.

When I finally got around to looking it up on Wikipedia, I found (among the usual “much else”) a quote from a reviewer, jazz critic Phil Johnson:

The score by Miles Davis has been described by jazz critic Phil Johnson as “the loneliest trumpet sound you will ever hear, and the model for sad-core music ever since. Hear it and weep.”

(Johnson’s description appears to be pretty much de rigeur in anything posted on the Web about the soundtrack.)

All of which more or less commanded me to hunt the film down. We rarely rent DVDs anymore, preferring the convenience of streaming films and old TV shows. The search took several tries: in the first place, the Guardian‘s piece referred to the film only by its British title; and, in the second, my main resources for streaming films (Netflix and Amazon) currently offer the film only via DVD. (I finally found it to stream on Hulu Plus.)

Although it’s now in the Hulu queue, I haven’t actually seen the film yet. But the Miles Davis score — oh, my. From the first listen, I knew I’d have to post the whole thing this week. It’s not even a half-hour long*; still, if you put it on auto-replay while writing, don’t be surprised to find “guns, dames, and hats” (as the Guardian sums up the genre) creeping into your storyline.

#	Title	Length
01	Générique	2:48
02	L’Assassinat De Carala	2:09
03	Sur L’Autoroute	2:17
04	Julien Dans L’Ascenseur	2:09
05	Florence Sur Les Champs-Élysées	2:50
06	Dîner Au Motel	3:57
07	Évasion De Julien	0:51
08	Visite Du Vigile	2:03
09	Au Bar Du Petit Bac	2:52
10	Chez Le Photographe Du Motel	3:04

(Note: The playlist goes automatically from start to finish, once you click the little Play button. To skip to the next number, once a song is playing you’ll find a little fast-forward button to the right of its progress meter — and a fast-rewind to the left, for that matter.)

[audio:01_generique_milesdavis.mp3, 02_lassassinatdecarala_milesdavis.mp3, 03_surlautoroute_milesdavis.mp3, 04_juliendanslascenseur_milesdavis.mp3, 05_florencesurleschampselysees_milesdavis.mp3, 06_dineraumotel_milesdavis.mp3, 07_evasiondejulien_milesdavis.mp3, 08_visiteduvigile_milesdavis.mp3, 09_aubardupetitbac_milesdavis.mp3, 10_chezlephotographedumotel_milesdavis.mp3|titles=Générique,L’Assassinat De Carala,Sur L’Autoroute,Julien Dans L’Ascenseur,Florence Sur Les Champs-Élysées,Dîner Au Motel,Évasion De Julien,Visite Du Vigile,Au Bar Du Petit Bac,Chez Le Photographe Du Motel|artists=Miles Davis]

______________________________

* The ten songs here are as they appeared on the original soundtrack album; they all appear in the film. However, a later release of the album included sixteen additional tracks — alternate takes, sometimes multiples, of the core ten. A recent re-release of the soundtrack (as above) omitted these out-takes, a fact which drives some Amazon reviewers crazy: they feel cheated. Sorry; I myself just cannot get worked up about missing the snippets from the cutting-room floor — not given the score as delivered.

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. ;)

“After the Ecstasy, the Laundry”

November 29, 2013 by John Leave a Comment

[Video: “Behind the scenes” look at the making of a pop-up “art book,” Everyday Wonders, which was created to advertise the features of a new Samsung smartphone. (The advertisement itself is here.)]

From whiskey river:

Pastoral

There are so many messages I can’t interpret.
The hundred maples at the edge of my street shout orange, orange,
orange, in silent voices. And may say more if I could decipher.

How I want to understand the many calls of the birds migrating through
on their long journey. And what is the message of the shaggy
wave-curled sea quarreling around the black rocks out at the far point?

Perhaps words themselves wander off into other fields, like sheep lost
in the depths of the hills beyond the local hills so the shepherd has to
go climbing up and down, his legs aching, his breath heavy
in his chest until he spies them off there under

that far evergreen, and wrestles them down and brings them home.

(Patricia Fargnoli [source])

…and:

Anyone can see that if grasping and aversion were with us all day and night without ceasing, who could ever stand them? Under that condition, living things would either die or become insane. Instead, we survive because there are natural periods of coolness, of wholeness, and ease. In fact, they last longer than the fires of our grasping and fear. It is this that sustains us. We have periods of rest making us refreshed, alive, well. Why don’t we feel thankful for this everyday Nirvana?

We already know how to let go — we do it every night when we go to sleep, and that letting go, like a good night’s sleep, is delicious. Opening in this way, we can live in the reality of our wholeness. A little letting go brings us a little peace, a greater letting go brings us a greater peace. Entering the gateless gate, we begin to treasure the moments of wholeness. We begin to trust the natural rhythm of the world, just as we trust our own sleep and how our own breath breathes itself.

(Jack Kornfield [source])

…and:

Use what you have, use what the world gives you. Use the first day of fall: bright flame before winter’s deadness; harvest; orange, gold, amber; cool nights and the smell of fire. Our tree-lined streets are set ablaze, our kitchens filled with the smells of nostalgia: apples bubbling into sauce, roasting squash, cinnamon, nutmeg, cider, warmth itself. The leaves as they spark into wild color just before they die are the world’s oldest performance art, and everything we see is celebrating one last violently hued hurrah before the black and white silence of winter.

(Shauna Niequist [source])

[Read more…]

Midweek Music Break: B.B. King, “To Know You Is to Love You”

November 27, 2013 by John Leave a Comment

I had this clever (well, okay: lame) idea to devote this Mid-Week Music Break to a playlist about gratitude of one kind or another, for one experience or another. But after riffling through the stacks (so to speak) for a good long while, wow, I was not coming up with a lot of winners.

Well, not unless you count hymns which (if we are to believe hundreds of old elementary- and Sunday-school music performances) were sung by 17th-century Massachusetts Pilgrims as they hastened and chastened to the Thanksgiving table… even though the hymns weren’t written for another two hundred-plus years.

Then I landed on a number by B.B. King, called “Thank You for Loving the Blues.” It’s not bad in its own right — a mix of talking voiceover and King’s characteristic, spectacularly flourishing guitar. (As I understand it, King wrote the poem he’s reciting.) But what really called to me was another piece from the same 1973 album — this one, the funky, epic eight-minute title track.

“To Know You Is to Love You” was written by Stevie Wonder and Syreeta Wright for the latter’s debut album, Syreeta. When B.B. King went to Philadelphia to record with with the band known as MFSB — who’d backed up the O’Jays, the Stylistics, Billy Paul, and other vocalists associated with the so-called “Philly Sound” — Stevie Wonder joined him and sat in at the keyboard. In an appreciation written a few years later, Rolling Stone writer Bob Palmer said:

The title tune alone is worth the price of admission. Stevie Wonder and Syreeta Wright composed it. Stevie plays electric piano, B.B. turns in a powerful vocal performance that is ably supported by his crackling guitar, and the incomparable Sigma Sound [Studios] rhythm section—the musicians who back Billy Paul, the O’Jays, the Intruders, and the Stylistics—contributes a hefty punch.

“Hefty punch” — I’ll say, especially in the horns. (Depending on whether you expect them or not, their sound may either get you up dancing or knock you back on your heels.) But then Palmer added:

The tempo and the minor mode have a superficial resemblance to “The Thrill Is Gone” [a King signature number, also on the album], but structurally “To Know You Is to Love You” isn’t a blues.

I don’t know enough about music to understand what “structurally” means in that context. But I do know that this powerful number both solidly resembles and radically departs from B.B. King’s sound as I’d come to expect. The instrumental breaks are above all pure (whether they’re powered by King’s guitar or by the horns), and I’ve got to say that both the rhythm on the chorus and the lyrics — at least as King interprets them — leave little doubt what the singer means by “knowing” the object of his affection. (Biblical, indeed. And yes, there was probably some gratitude in the relationship… eventually, once things calmed down a little.)

[Below, click Play button to begin To Know You Is to Love You. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 8:35 long.]

[audio:toknowyouistoloveyou_bbking.mp3|titles=’To Know You Is to Love You’|artists=B.B. King]

[Lyrics]

(For an excellent review of both the album as a whole and this particular song, check this post over at Derek Anderson’s blog — “the music blog where music matters.”)

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.