Tag: Life

How ‘Pit-a-Pat High Jinks’ came into play

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Indiana wasn’t the only thing bogging down my original subway manuscript. The dude’s life off in the countryside after college was another big complication.

Well, that and my grounding as a journalist, meaning focusing on facts as I observed them, in contrast to writing as a novelist, meaning putting feelings and some imagination first.

Head for the hills, then, as I did by default to upstate New York. I didn’t get there quite as I describe Kenzie’s journey, but the route wasn’t that far off, either. In the story, I’ve kept the location rather vague. It could as easily be pockets of western Connecticut or the Berkshires in Massachusetts or even southern Vermont. Let them blend together.

I was pretty lost in my first year-and-a-half after college, the period leading up to my embrace of yoga. It was a wild ride for me, at the margin of general society; my highs punctuated deep depression. Most of my friends – including housemates and girlfriends – were from The City or its wider orb, and that included short trips with them when my work schedule permitted. (I rarely had two days off in a row, much less three.) And, my, was I green.

For much of that period, my own journalism slash writing career and dreams were going nowhere and paid next to nothing. More troubling, my love life was non-existent, even considering how I had a housemate who came back every night with a different bedmate, all of them delectable in my sight. What was my problem? What was wrong with me? What was I missing?

And then I found yoga and everything changed. Even the romance.

What could possibly be wrong with that story?

Well, it had fed into Subway Hitchhikers, but most of what I had drafted there was eventually excised to focus on the urban dimension of the story.

~*~

During this period, my social life revolved around two locations.

The first was a once luxurious apartment building turned slum at the edge of downtown. I later moved it to Daffodil along the Ohio River far to the west for the college-years novel. Well, many but not all of the renters were college students.

The second encampment was what many people would consider a hippie commune out in the hills, a very rundown farm high in the hillsides along the state line. As I explain in what’s now Pit-a-Pat High Jinks, we shared the expenses but not our incomes. I now think there were some freeloaders anyway.

Both dwellings, from what I see in satellite photos, have been torn down.

And I still believe my two-ring circus there (three, if you include the newspaper where I was employed) was a richer source of characters than, say, Bonanza or the Friends sitcom.

~*~

I’ll have to revisit my journals for clues about how the lode from this period evolved during revisions. When I heard about Smashwords a dozen years after the subway novel had been published, I must have already had two versions of the experience in hand, both drawn from the earlier outtakes augmented by journal entries and correspondence.

They differed sharply in tone and focus.

Hippie Drum was closer to a memoir that focused on the general hippie scene around me. Hippie Love paralleled the chronology but focused on its erotic encounters, with the added twist that our protagonist had far more success in the love department. One was gritty; the other, free-wheelin’ trippy.

In these parallel accounts of the same story line, the first focused on Kenzie’s overall adjustments to being out on his own, adapting to the workplace and his new housemates and a wider underground, freaky community. He was desperate for love but rarely connected. Frankly, much of the hippie life was drab and impoverished. The other, an R- or X-rated version, was more fanciful, examining what could have been if he had possessed a bit more finesse. Both books ended at the same point.

Making sense of what happened in my outwardly dull life in goofy counter-culture times included what happened out in the sticks were nobody seemed to be looking, that is, where I had landed or even taken refuge. It was just up the road from Woodstock, only on the far side of the Big Apple.

~*~

I originally envisioned the two books kind of like the three-show play The Norman Conquests, where a line of conversation starts in one room and of finishes a night or two later on the other side of door he had passed through. Not that I was that meticulous in my crafting. I was just trying to run with the material at hand.

Alas, the “love” book was wisely deemed “adult” content, invisible unless you checked your filter.

~*~

As for related input? Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers, Jack Kerouac’s spree narratives, Anais Nin’s sexual frontiers, Robert Crumb’s stoned cartoons, and Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant” can be seen as touchstones for what finally came back together as a single volume, Pit-a-Pat High Jinks, in its current incarnation. There may even be some Hunter Thompson in the mix.

~*~

Hippie Drum was the first book I published at Smashwords.

Hippie Love came out the next month.

Both, in the autumn of 2013.

‘Big cities’ in my life

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

I’ve long been fascinated by major metropolises, or at least the concept of a downtown as a pulsing power center buzzing with fashionable activity. My hometown, while a thriving city at the time, never struck me as “big.” As for glitz? Forget it.

In the list I’ve assembled, each of the cities has at least one professional baseball team, and today also an NFL team, not that sports were a big factor for me. Great symphony orchestras and art museums, however, definitely were. And later, I came to see subway systems as another measure; the majority of the cities here have them.

All but one of these locations is somewhere I’ve been more than once, and we’re not even counting connecting flights at the airport. While I’ve resided inside only one of these hubs, I’ve lived within the gravitational orb of another seven.

That said, here goes, presented more or less in the order in which I experienced them.

  1. Cincinnati: I grew up about an hour away, and once I got my driver’s license, I got to know the place much better than just Crosley Field, riverboat rides, the zoo, or the observation deck atop the Carew Tower, destinations of family outings or school field trips. I’ll save the details for later.
  2. Chicago: The Loop, with its narrow canyons between skyscrapers, and the walkway along the Chicago River still embody the visceral excitement I identify as big city. An initial visit as a teen followed by visits to friends and lovers later culminated when I worked for the media syndicate of the Chicago Tribune and was whisked up high in its tower overlooking Lake Michigan.
  3. New York: I didn’t get to the Big Apple until the summer between my junior and senior year of college. I was living in a boarding house and working an internship about four hours Upstate, but after graduation I returned and had housemates and friends from The City. Visiting the place with them was delightful. Later, living in the ashram about two hours away or in Baltimore to the south, I got in for even more exposure.
  4. Seattle: During my four years in the desert of Washington state, an escape to “the wet side” of the Cascade mountains was a regular part of our existence. I’m not sure how much I’d recognize the place now, but we did have friends who’d put us up. Even then, people were worried the city would lose its charm, the way San Francisco had.
  5. San Francisco: In my one visit, there was still some charm left. Especially the affordable ethnic restaurants out in the neighborhood where we were staying, with our sleeping bags on the floor. The hippies had long gone to greener pastures, but City Lights bookstore was still packed.
  6. Cleveland: Living about two hours away, I got to know the city on Lake Erie mostly as University Circle, with its extraordinary art museum (free admission), famed concert hall, genealogical library, and Quaker Meeting. The downtown still hadn’t rebounded. I’ll also include the famed orchestra’s summer home south of town as part of the experience.
  7. Pittsburgh: Two hours in the other direction, we spent more time in Squirrel Hill and the university neighborhood than downtown. The steel mills were long gone, but major corporate headquarters still flavored the core, much more than they did Cleveland.
  8. Baltimore: Oh, how I loved the place. My first apartment was the top floor of a rowhouse within walking distance of symphony hall. The gentrified neighborhood was something like Boston’s Beacon Hill but pre-Civil War era rather than Colonial. Even when I relocated to a suburb, I spent a lot of time in Roland Park and a few other neighborhoods. The Inner Harbor was always a delight.
  9. Washington: Living about an hour to the north in my Baltimore sojourn meant I could head down easily, usually to visit friends in the Maryland suburbs. What surprises me on reflection is how little I made of the opportunity to do more. Yes, I did use the National Archive and Library of Congress a few times for genealogical research, and visited the imposing National Gallery and the Phillips more collegial collection, but I never got to the Smithsonian or White House tour or any of the monuments, really. Besides, there was nothing much of a downtown – charming Georgetown seemed to fill that function.
  10. Boston: It took me a while to warm up to Boston, but once I was living an hour to the north, my attitude changed. For more than 30 years, then, I turned to its museums, theaters, concert venues, bookstores, record stores, restaurants, and more, even contradancing two or so times a week, and that was before having a girlfriend or two in the suburbs or joining a suburb community choir just beyond Cambridge. In the end, though, I was still an outsider.

I realize how much the experience of most of these places is based on walking. Pedestrian-friendly was a key element separating them from others.

Honorable mentions: Worcester, Saint Louis, Toronto, Philadelphia, Montreal, Detroit, Providence.

 

 

Falling into a time warp

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

 When Adam came downstairs with this, I felt it was validation for a bit of history I had just come across online.

This was the backside of a baseboard.

He does look like something of a space alien here, adding to the time machine impression. But a full dinner for $1.50 and up? That does seem surreal today.

The sign was one of several he had uncovered while removing baseboard upstairs. The writing had faced the wall. Yankees are notorious for frugality of the sort that wastes nothing, if possible.

I had just started researching the history of our house, starting with the property deed transactions at the courthouse in Machias. One of our predecessors had owned and operated a well-known restaurant. Her obituary also described her as an exacting carpenter, so here was a piece of evidence.

I’ll save her full story and those of the others for later in this series, but let’s just say, the house was beginning to look a lot older than we’d suspected when we bid on it.

For example, hand-split oak lathing like this had gone out of use by 1830, or so we were told. This piece was extracted when carving out space for the toilet and bathtub.

Hand-split oak lathing went out of usage by 1830, I’ve been told. Ours was also charred by a house fire, possibly one from a nearby chimney.

The burn marks on the underside of the flooring also suggested another serious house fire.

Another detail is the molding on the side of our stairs. The same pattern is found on other houses in town from the 1830s and 1840s.

I’m assuming this was from an update to the house.

And, from a technical point of view, ours wasn’t a post-and-beam house but rather timber framed, meaning wooden pegs held the big pieces together – and the weight of the structure didn’t come down the inside walls.

The old wood was denser, too, than what you’d buy today.

Cross-section of our old rafters.

I do love daffodils, by the way

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Having Subway Hitchhikers come out first did throw a ringer into the sequence of what would emerge as a kind of series. For one thing, it was out of print when the ebooks came along.

For another, I needed to tone down some of the hippie excesses.

As I’ve said, it started out as a nice, thin book. I completed the first draft shortly after leaving the ashram. But somehow, before I could land a publisher, it started growing. And growing. It gained a sizable back story as well as a parallel out-in-the-sticks hippie existence.

Getting to what would be published as Daffodil Sunrise leaves me in somewhat of a fog. Chronologically, it’s the earliest part of the story, detailing the transformation of a straight young photographer from Iowa into a hippie on a state university in Daffodil, Indiana. OK, no secret, it’s an abstraction of Bloomington and Indiana University, embodied the emergence of the character who started out as Duma Luma but now goes by Kenzie.

From what I’ve seen, very little fiction has been published about today’s American Midwest, at least in contrast to Manhattan or Los Angeles or even the South. Who’s speaking up for that part of the country, relating a viewpoint its natives might feel is theirs? It is vastly misunderstood.

Within that, Indiana stands as a crossroads, one with a strong Southern influence as well. I’ll argue it’s even a kind of symbol of middle America. It’s the only Midwestern state, by the way, not to carry a Native name but rather the generic Indian-a. It also is largely farmland with big cities at its corners: Chicago, Detroit, and Cincinnati.

Kurt Vonnegut strongly resonated with me as a missing voice, a straightforward one with biting humor. As I turned to drafting and revising, he definitely felt like a clarion in the wilderness. Especially his novel, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. Do I have do explain what growing up as a Goldwater Republican was like?

To get closer to the hippie vibe, add Tom Wolfe, definitely not a hippie but someone I first read when he was a columnist for the New York Herald Tribune, my favorite newspaper of all time. His supercharged prose fit the sensation of the surreal and vibrant new world the Revolution of Peace & Love was unleashing. Or so we thought.

Other influences I might throw in are Abby Hoffman’s Steal This Book, though I didn’t buy any of it, or Jerry Rubin’s political entreaties, or Herman Hesse’s shining ideals. As for love, though? I’m drawing a blank. At some point Richard Farina’s Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me caught my fancy, along with Thomas Pyncheon’s V, which finally made sense under an altered state of mind.

Perhaps Genji and Monkey, too?

Bloomington was seen as a wild and somewhat threatening place throughout the rest of the state, yet seemed to be so backward compared to, say Yellow Springs and Antioch, which in turn would seem so far behind the radical curve once I got to the East Coast.

I didn’t want to see any of what I was writing as a rite-of-passage tale, not even for an entire generation of my contemporaries in a Vietnam era. And yet?

I wasn’t seeing the experience, mine or that of those around me, anywhere in the public eye. What was appearing in the spotlight was San Francisco, the Manson cult, the Kent State shootings, and the later circle that abducted heiress Patty Hearst, which originated in Bloomington after I left.

Activist Saul Alinsky, among others, was right in his criticism of hippie political and social action, by the way.

Back to my story. What we think of as the hippie movement really revolved around university campuses. Think about that. It was no longer destitute runaways in San Francisco but legions in enclaves around the country.

Here I was, writing furiously in 1986-87, wondering where it had all gone. Or, I should say, is going.

The big issues still remain, bigger than ever, from climate catastrophe on down.

How could we have gotten this so wrong?

Well, Flower Power did have a lasting impact, though it’s largely taken for granted. The best I could hope for, then, is a reminder or better yet, to rekindle the flame in a younger generation.

Ever really look at those playing cards?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Yup, there are 52 in a deck, plus one to six Jokers, at least if you’re looking at what’s considered a standard commercial deck. There are, however, other traditional, and often older, suites to consider. Today we’ll put those off for another time and stick to the French-suited cards that are almost universally found in English-speaking countries. Got that?

To continue:

  1. The deck has four suits (clubs, diamonds, spades, and hearts) that come in 13 ranks, starting with the ten numeral or pip cards – if you’re wondering why there’s no “1,” it’s actually the Ace, despite its usual power. And then there are the three ranks of royalty, the court or face cards we know as Jack, Queen, King.
  2. Each numeral card displays the appropriate number of pips (the suit images) as well as the numeral itself.
  3. Early cards were single-headed, or single-ended, but that changed around 1860, when the double-headed versions appeared. These could be read without having to turn them to an up-position. Corner indices were added around 1880.
  4. The Jack of spades and the Jack of hearts appear in profile and are thus known as “one-eyed” Jacks. Likewise, the King of diamonds is depicted with one eye. The rest of the royals are shown full-face or oblique.
  5. Suicide kings appear in hearts, where he usually has a sword behind his head, as if stabbing himself, and in diamonds, where he has an ax pointed blade-down toward him. Adding to the nickname is the blood-red color on the card.
  6. The Queen of spades, holding a scepter, is also known as the black lady or bedpost Queen. She’s the only Queen facing left.
  7. The Ace of spades is sometimes called the death card. Those printed or sold in England from the reign of James I until 1960 carried an indication of the printer and that an excise tax on the deck had been paid.
  8. The 52 cards are said to represent the 52 weeks of the year, with 13 cards for each season or the 13 lunar cycles of the year.
  9. Possibly originating in China or India or Persia, the cards arrived in Europe from Egypt in the 1370s, perhaps in the hands of Crusaders. The first cards were hand-printed, limiting them to the wealthy classes. That changed with the arrival of the printing press at the end of the 15th century.
  10. Originally, the suit symbols were taken from everyday objects, which may have had any symbolic meaning: flowers, animals, birds, shields, crowns, pennies, rings, even pomegranates. I rather like the possibilities there, “King of bears” or “Queen of bananas.”

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.

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.

Feeling excited about my new room, especially

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Our project was envisioned by other family members and my being included in their dream felt, well, adventurous. They had some definite ideas and strong opinions but were also practical, frugal, and flexible. I would have been content to leave well enough alone, if only their thinking and style hadn’t continued to impress me as we marched forward.

Remember, these are my retirement years, unlike theirs. I’ve been downsizing and discovering how much I can live without. I had some big dreams in the previous move, and when they didn’t manifest, I refocused.

Look at all that extra room.

But then, as our new dwelling was stripped of half of its top half, a reality began to excite me: my bedroom and studio workspace were shaping up as something entirely new, tailored for me. I wouldn’t be trying to fit into some previously existing room but rather shaping one to my own preferences. I thought of windows that would allow more bookshelves and wall for artwork yet still flood the room in natural light. The ceiling would feel airy, even though one side would be lower than ideal for me – in this case, we’d make it play into the angle. There would be abundant electrical outlets, too.

No longer would I have a washing machine in one corner, but rather I would have a door between my bed and the household access to the bathroom. Yes, privacy! I would miss the proximity to the kitchen and my overhearing phone-call details of our shared daily life here – that room is the hub of life in our home – but I would also feel freer to dial up the opera when others were also in the house.

We had already agreed to keep the flooring rather rustic, more or less matching the existing planks, and the walls white, to enhance the natural light. That left window coverings and trim color for accents. I was leaning toward blue, especially indigo I associate with Japanese fabric.

The big question was just how much of my goods I could fit into the room and perhaps how much might go into the emerging guest room, the mirror-image at the other end of the hallway.

We’re keeping the charred rafter exposed, a souvenir of the downtown fire of 1886..

As we pondered the emerging space, we opted to go for cathedral ceilings rather than flat and later, as a quirky touch, to keep the charred rafters at either gable exposed when the drywall went up.

These two rooms were starting to feel more like nests, actually. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

In the company of other writers

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

For 23 years after the appearance of my first book, I was stymied, as far as paper publication went.

Apart from the PDF publication of my second novel, in 2005, I couldn’t get a nibble. Not just the novels, either. Even my poetry books failed to garner print editions.

My on-the-job hours didn’t help either – nights and weekends. So much for networking.

~*~

Looking back, I can acknowledge how some writers’ circles have been very helpful along the way.

The first was an off-campus group in Bloomington gathered around the annual review Stoney Lonesome, named after a village in bucolic Brown County nearby. Once a month, its editors hosted a group that had a featured reader followed by an open mic and sometimes gentle criticism. It gave me the nudge to go deeper into poetry – “You’re hooked,” as one said – along with some great tips for submissions to the small-press scene. I was also invited to coedit an edition, which came out shortly I had relocated to Washington state.

I’ve never been one to be in a writers’ circle closely critiquing each other’s work. The time commitment was one problem, along with the difficulty of finding the right mix of participants. You know, like being a classical musician in a punk band.

There was a group in Baltimore during my sabbatical year, though I’m not sure where its core energy was. The highlight for me was a talk by Tom Clancy just before the movie version of Hunt for Red October was released. I don’t even remember where our regular meetings were held.

In New Hampshire, several open poetry mics took place on nights I could attend. One was weekly in Concord, filled with a hip young crowd and some edgy writing. I was the featured poet there on several occasions.

Another was a poetry group at the local Barnes & Noble, mostly young writers and good energy.

And then I relocated to the seacoast and got bumped to working the second shift, which did free up my Saturdays, if I could get up and away in time.

I joined the Poetry Society of New Hampshire, which had a major event each quarter – the same date, alas, as my ministry and counsel committee of New England Quakers met. The poetry group was more attuned to rhyme-tasters and school programs than to the avant-garde realm I’ve pursued.

Instead, a weekly series just over the state line in Massachusetts filled the gap. Held in a coffee house at the back of a boatyard and overlooking the harbor, Merrimac Mic had a lively bunch of regulars and gave me the featured reader spot multiple times. Isabell was a most appropriately eccentric emcee and organizer.

Performing your work before a crowd is a fine way of measuring its status. The energy of the audience can reflect whether the piece is effective as well as expose deficiencies. Besides, it’s an excellent way to pitch in with a group, as you would at a potluck dinner.

I’m not so sure about contests, but it seems to keep some other writers energized.

At the newspaper, I didn’t go straight from full-time employment to retirement. In the midst of some contentious contract negotiations, some of us were offered a chance to take a buyout. Then it was yanked off the table only to resurface on short notice. I took it.

That gave me a heavenly midwinter month where I indulged in a reading orgy, supported by the monthly severance checks. But the newsroom was short-staffed and wanted me back as a part-timer up to four days a week. Somehow, that felt quite different from the earlier tensions. I could choose which nights I wanted free, and I was no longer party to the office politics.

That’s how I had the Monday night off for a monthly Writers Night Out in Portsmouth, a wide-ranging mix of writers – filmmakers, ad copywriters, playwrights, public relations folks, in addition to poets, short-story writers, and novelists – who met over beer and appetizers or snacks. Writers’ schmooze, as I called it. Each of us briefly shared something about our latest project before the full gathering, accepted feedback, and then broke out into smaller clusters of similarly engaged individuals. Somehow, we weren’t competing with each other – I especially valued the perspective of a well-place sci fi writer and a younger multimedia artist – and the chatter was always helpful. The frustration of marketing was probably our No. 1 topic of discussion.

Those events ran about the time I took up blogging – or building my platform, as we were advised. It’s probably where I first heard about WordPress. And it’s definitely where I first heard mention of Smashwords. (What!?)

Yes, especially, Smashwords.

I hadn’t even considered the option of ebooks, and everything I’d heard up to that point was beyond my budget. Not so here.

Now, as I was saying about getting together with other writers? It really is essential.