Over the hump?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

Any expectation of having the back half of the upstairs finished before starting on the front slowly faded from reality. We definitely wouldn’t be moving goods from downstairs or storage into the new space anytime soon.

Just look at the ridgepole and it was obvious Adam would need to have elbow room to work freely up while attaching the new rafters before any wall could go in.

The rafters and roofing to the right of the new ridge pole are about to come off. It’s a miracle they’ve stayed up as long as they have.

He did have to demolish the drywall and framing that had separated the front and back rooms, and with that came my realization that putting up new drywall any time before the entire upstairs was ready for that phase of work was premature. As would be painting the walls, ceilings, and floors. Duh!

Adam’s big shock came when he exposed the top of the existing dormer and found that there was nothing to speak of holding the descending rafter. What were they thinking?

The rafter was simply cut short when the dormer was added. The plank under it was insufficient for the weight sitting upon it.

It was one more impending disaster that had somehow kept ticking until being defused now.

~*~

The front half promised to be less complex than the previous section. There was no plumbing and only two rooms rather than four. On the other hand, the top of the stairs might add some complications.

Officially released today, hooray!

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

I rather backed into this project, beginning with the elusive question, “What do Quakers believe?”

It led me to something much bigger, ranging beyond the Society of Friends, but springing from the seemingly quaint language of its earliest voices in mid-1600s Britain. There are good reasons the time and place are referred to as the world turned upside down.

Centering their experiences in three interlocking metaphors – Light, Seed, and Truth – they created what’s been called an alternative Christianity, and though their thinking and process have been diluted over the centuries since, their foundation remains revolutionary, startling, and challenging. I’ll argue that it’s cutting-edge contemporary, as well, in a time of disbelief and skepticism.

For one thing, how do you see “truth” as a verb? It becomes something quite different from carved marble or courtroom proceedings.

While some of the chapters originally appeared as chapbooks at Thistle Finch editions, this newly enlarged volume of essays 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.

The book now ranges far beyond religion and spirituality, by the way. Even atheists have their beliefs. Change the perspective, as I think I do, and you can find the exchange of first-hand experiences refreshing. How else can we talk about the deepest issues in life?

The move unites the essays in a single volume, rather than a series of four smaller chapbooks, and makes them available to a wider range of readers worldwide.

Do take a look.

Breaking my literary logjam was a godsend

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

For readers and for writers, the emergence of Smashwords.com revolutionized the publishing world. It also made self-publishing a much less risky investment for those of us who are indy authors, and let readers purchase books by unknown writers at low cost. It consolidated the platforms so readers of Nook or iPhones could read the same offerings as those coming from Kindle. It also offered an alternative to Amazon, which countered with Kindle Direct Publishing, meaning we could appear in both venues. Real competition can be a good thing, right? Essentially, it’s free for those who follow a few formatting guidelines and can design our own covers.

Since I’ve posted previously about the pros and cons of digital books versus paper, both for readers and for writers, I’ll focus today on my personal reflections on the development.

Getting my books “out there,” rather than collecting dust in a filing cabinet, provided a huge emotional relief. Twenty-three years had passed between the publication of Subway Hitchhikers and my Smashwords debut. And now the novels were available at the Apple Store, Barnes & Nobel, and other ebook retailers, as well as public libraries.

First out of the gate was Hippie Drum, drawn from my subway story outtakes, at the end of May 2013.

At the beginning of September came Hippie Love, using other outakes, and then Ashram in October, reissuing what had been Adventures on a Yoga Farm.

Daffodil Sunrise, developing more of the subway story outtakes, appeared in November.

Subway Hitchhikers was republished in January 2014.

So I had something along the lines of Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet before the public or maybe a string of Jack Kerouac tales.

I then turned to my other big pile of drafting to extract Promise, which appeared in April. I intended to follow that one with two related novels, but the royalties weren’t covering the cost of having a designer create fronts for those volumes. Instead, Peel (as in apple) and St. Helens in the Mix would eventually appear as free PDFs at my Thistle Finch imprint.

That left Hometown News, my newspaper-based novel, for September release.

Getting noticed, however, was a different matter. Nobody was reviewing digital editions, or at least nobody of note. You can’t sign copies at readings or bookstores, either. What was left was largely social media.

And that’s where it stood until the beginning of 2018, when What’s Left joined the lineup. I’ll tell you more about that one and its impact on the earlier volumes in an upcoming post.

As for marketing and self-promotion? It’s still an uphill struggle. Do most users of Facebook even buy books?

Things that define a viable downtown

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

No matter how large or small a community, there’s something about having a place we know as downtown that makes a difference. It’s like a center of gravity.

Forget the big banks, jewelry stores, or medical offices that are empty at night.

Here are some elements to consider.

  1. Functioning post office. Once it moves to the outskirts, it’s curtains for many towns. Or at least did, back before email and Amazon. Well, we still need somewhere to send off those return items or to get our passports.
  2. A brewpub or microbrewery. Think about it. A social place to gather casually that doesn’t feel like a stinky dark bar.   
  3. A decent diner or coffee house. Ditto.
  4. Distinctive restaurant. Doesn’t have to be fancy but definitely worthy of a dinner date. Ethnic certainly fits here.   
  5. Hardware store, pharmacy, and grocery. Meet real-life needs.
  6. Residents: They’re what keeps the place from becoming a desert at night.  
  7. Pedestrian friendly. Keep parking at the fringe, please, or in some kind of balance.   
  8. Library. It’s not all about books.
  9. Arts opportunities. Galleries, theaters, concert venues all add vitality.
  10. Waterfront. Once scorned and polluted, a cleaned-up stream or coastline is a mesmerizing attraction. We can sit and watch the motion for hours and then feel rested.

Acid test novelist: Jack Kerouac (1922-1969)

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

My introduction to Kerouac was the 1968 Paris Review interview he gave to Ted Berrigan (accompanied by Aram Saroyan, if I recall right – they did have to crawl through a bedroom window to get around Kerouac’s watchdog wife). The idea of typing on long scrolls of teletype paper was something I certainly took up after graduation from college – many mornings I had to go into the newsroom before dawn to attend to the teletype machines and replace the rolls of paper. Nobody else was interested in the discarded bolts.

I’ve never been able to get through On the Road but have read about everything else he wrote, especially Dharma Bums. What appealed in the hippie experience of the early ‘70s was Kerouac’s narrative of similar questing for transcendental awarenesses in music and poetry, music, travel, spirituality/religion, and romantic love – often in the realities of borderline squalor. His experiments with Buddhism resonated with my early yoga, though I now see how much it was more an exploration of French-Canadian Catholicism. The jazz details the excitement of the transformations of the ‘50s and its Beat movement, history as it happened.

At the time, I didn’t realize how much Binghamton in upstate New York resembled Kerouac’s native Lowell, Massachusetts, but without the French-Canadian dimension. The rawness of his freeform narrative was nevertheless entrancing.

Eventually, when I moved to Manchester, New Hampshire, I encountered the Quebec element in the city’s West Side and then in the mills of Lowell itself. We even had obituaries for some of his distant kin who spelled the name Kirouac.

For a fact-oriented journalist like me, his dark and cloudy and openly emotional approach to a story was a revelation. As an aside, I must confess that I now see Henry Miller’s earlier stream-of-thought fiction is superior.

As for Kerouac’s celebrated and lamented Cody? I seriously doubt that he measured up to his image. But that’s a matter of being human, too.