Folks also approved of the shirt.
Month: February 2024
Love life ups and downs
I promised my first lover I’d never write about her, meaning in my books. And I promised another that no matter what, I’d always leave the door open.
So while neither of them is outwardly present, my novels originate in heartbreak. There, I’ve said it. And also in hope.
Yes, I promised her I would never write about her, even though I’m pretty sure she’s never read anything I’ve written in the past 54 years.
It’s not that she didn’t cast a shadow over the story, but rather that her spot on the stage is abstracted into a more universal figure, perhaps even an archetype. Details from later lovers have also been woven in to the point a composite female emerges.
How could I deny the passionate devotion or yearning? Like so much else of the hippie outbreak, it could be embarrassing today.
I did ceremonially burn the letters I had kept until moving to Dover. It was a long fire.
~*~
It’s unlikely that my life would have gone in the direction it did if she hadn’t appeared in my life.
The hippie side, definitely.
And my yoga, while she veered off with the Sufis.
I didn’t realize just how rich they were or how much of my ancestral farmland they were buying up. Her parents were still quite supportive of me, anyway.
I still needed someone to fill her place in my novel Daffodil Uprising.
~*~
Much of what followed turns up in Pit-a-Pat High Jinks, including my first Summer of Love.
I’m curious to hear their side of the story. Most likely, I was pretty pathetic. I certainly was naïve and not the most savvy romantic. Like what did I really have to offer anyone? In my revisions, I was able to include details from twenty-some years later, my second Summer of Love, but Peace and Love had more grittier aspects than the dippy love songs present. Let’s turn to the blues.
For me, at least, the experiences turned out to be very confusing.
At one stage in the later drafts, as I tried to come to grips with the conflicting accounts of one character’s past she had revealed to me (the real-life person, not the abstracted figure in the story), I actually broke down weeping as I sensed she had been a victim of sexual abuse from at least several directions. No wonder her accounts to me hadn’t added up.
We did reconnect online, but I didn’t dare broach the possibility. Was she even aware of them or was she still in denial. There was no way to ask, though. Besides, she barely recalled me, though she had been a big thing for me.
~*~
The love life definitely came into play with Nearly Canaan, though the abstraction underwent greater transposition. Ages and genders changed, for one thing. Tracking real life, the relationship turned into marriage now mirrored in the marriages around the central couple.
I was really dashed when one literary agent said she didn’t like the character based on my now ex-wife, someone I still saw on a pedestal. Back to the drawing board, along with some therapy sessions for a clearer understanding. My remarriage helped me recast much of this, too.
If only I could have kept this within the bounds of a Romance genre, I might have had a bestseller. Right?
Cover update: Sometimes minor tweaks count
One of the delights of ebook publishing is the ease with which updates can be made. It’s not like having a warehouse of paper volumes to discard in the process.
Recently, while preparing a new book for release at Smashwords.com, I revisited my novel, Hometown News, and wondered if the cover might work more effectively than it did.
I liked the cleanness of the current design and the graphic impact of the elements but questioned whether it might convey a better sense of being about the news business itself. The typeface on the cover conveys the title but nothing else. The story does play out in a moderately-sized industrial city, which also needs to be hinted at in the design.
The photo delivers on the idea of hot news and impending disaster as well as a working-class, blue-collar neighborhood, but I was curious to see if it might have more punch if it reached both sides of the cover. Or “bled” off the page, as we’d say in the trade.
The previous version of the cover did just that, but cropping the photo to accommodate the title and author type was another matter. Remember, ebook covers are essentially thumbnails to be viewed on a cell phone, laptop, or tablet computer screen.
The photo here is cropped less tightly than on the later cover. Does including a portion of the porch roof below add to the message or does it lessen the immediacy? Does the placement of my name detract from that?
There are good reasons this one went back to the drawing board.
The first cover, below, played on the idea of bucolic small-town America and fit into the series of covers of my other novels, but as you can see, there’s no promise of the coming drama within the book itself. So much for brand identity.
While this one was produced by a professional designer at low cost, I must ask myself what an artist would do as an alternative to a photo as the key graphic element. Perhaps a roll of newspaper reaching out across a steel mill and downtown? Downplaying color might allow for the title and author’s name to float over the artwork and still be readable, something that simply wasn’t working with the house fire photo.
Few newspapers have managed with a feel-good approach to community, no matter what many critics would wish. Everybody hates a fire, right? With a morbid fascination?
Returning to the design challenge, here’s where the book stands now:
The key to the redesign was having the name in a single line, like a newspaper nameplate. Thus, a different serif typeface in the new cover. Admittedly, it is harder to read as a thumbnail, but I am going with the tradeoff. I’m venturing that it will reenforce the type on a Web site’s pitch rather than run alone.
The photo, once again, bleeds off the page, delivering maximum visual impact.
More and more, I’m looking at an ebook cover as a poster than as packaging for a commodity.
What do you look for in a book cover?
Recognizing a degree of imperfection
But cool and candid people will at once reflect, that the purest of human blessings must have a portion of alloy in them, that the choice must always be made, if not of the lesser evil, at least the GREATER, not the PERFECT good; and that in every political institution, a power to advance the public happiness, involves a discretion which may be misapplied and abused.
James Madison in Federalist No. 41
Just in time for the new political season
My series of polemic political poems – they’re not exactly protest songs, but I wouldn’t complain if they were – has moved from Thistle Finch editions to Smashwords.com, where they’re now available in a range of ebook formats, hopefully for a wider readership.
In the transition, the poems are now presented in a single volume rather than six shorter chapbooks.
These blasts of alarm and rage, 1976-2008, are an emotional mirror of events leading up to today, a not-so-distant past that’s been intensifying toward devastation. Let them stand as a call for personal honesty and engagement, too.
Take heed, if you will.
For me, this also presents the excitement of my first book release since September/October ’22, when Quaking Dover appeared. It comes with an admission that these poems are largely spontaneous, as in combustion, and sometimes sophomoric. I’ll ride with that, considering the fervor of adolescence, including ambitions.
While the poems are rooted in recent history and its headlines, they’re more pertinent than ever.
Having originally appeared as six short chapbooks, this collection is now available on your choice of ebook platforms at Smashwords.com and its affiliated digital retailers. Those outlets include the Apple Store, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Scribd, and Sony’s Kobo. You may also request the ebook from your local public library.
Please take a look.
Wintry wall, a study in gray and green
Fresh, wet snow on evergreens
Some things ‘Quaking Dover’ has in common with my novels
Not that I really noticed the parallels until now.
- Counterculture is central, leading to an awareness of an underground community or at least kindred spirits.
- Both have meant learning to write differently than my neutral third-person journalism. Emotion, for instance, over fact, is the rule in the fiction. And the history opened a similar vein as creative nonfiction.
- The role of a narrator in both. In the history, that meant developing the gently laughing curmudgeon as he pored over historical data. In four of the hippie novels, it was the snarky daughter reviewing her late daddy’s hippie experiences.
- Both veins are self-published, falling under the shadow of being “not commercially viable” by publishing houses. That places an additional burden on the author.
- Marketing is a huge challenge. Apart from Subway Visions, none of my stories take place in a big city or address a big audience. How many hippie novels can you name, anyway. As for Quakers?
- Spirituality and religion run through all of them. In the novels, it’s often yoga, though Hometown News runs up against a puzzling array of churches. In Quaking Dover, though, it’s often the clash between the upstart Friends and what I first saw as rigid Puritans before both traditions begin to, uh, mellow.
- There’s a strong sense of place, even if these locations are far from the mass-media spotlight.
- I go for the big picture. I really would like to have a simple book – something, as Steven King advises, having only one big idea – but that’s not how my mind works.
- They’ve all undergone deep revision. Much of the fiction actually got new titles and new characters after their original publication.
- They were all labors of love.
Souvenirs on the mantel
A few things gleaned in our walks around here.
Acid test nature writer: Barry Holstun Lopez (1945-2020)
My introduction was at a multidisciplinary conference at Fort Warden State Park in Port Townsend, Washington, in the late ‘70s. Lopez had just published his celebrated Of Wolves and Men, and this was a weeklong gathering of writers, naturalists, scientists, and a few others.
Three of his smaller, later books have especially held my attention: Desert Notes, Arctic Dreams, and Giving Birth to Thunder, Sleeping with His Daughter, presenting Native American mythology, especially the Trickster figure, Coyote. These volumes are sometimes classified as fiction, but they really straddle genres.
Maybe that’s why I return to Lopez more than to Rachel Carson or Annie Dillard or even Henry David Thoreau.
He did serve as an inspiration for two of the novellas that appear in my book, The Secret Side of Jaya. Well, maybe even the third one, too.
I had already drafted my longpoem, Recovering Olympus, as well as probing Native American lore since my years in the ashram, where Asian mythology also started infusing my awareness.
Lopez, though, had some serious fieldwork to support his visions.
Jnana's Red Barn 