Page Publishing finally printed my novel. I was hoping to see a physical book in print being promoted by its publisher, though I am no longer confident that such a thing can happen. The more time that passes, the more I find out about Page being a scammer-type publisher. The mistakes they made in my work in editing were apparently on purpose. I think if I had more control over the publishing process, the book might actually sell. So my resolve was to do only the cheapest possible self-publishing. Amazon KDP came through with that, though I make practically nothing in royalties and have to promote the book myself.
My art, my writing, and my life are basically organic, growing and changing in dynamic and unpredictable ways. That is the biggest drag on living in this mechanized, grinding-wheels-for-profit world. I don’t fit into their neat and perfectly stackable boxes of officially sanctioned society. They have to chop the leaves and branches off my tree of creativity to make me fit. I am thoroughly tired of saw blades and wood-choppers of the metaphorical kind.
My swimming pool is now a grassless space for reading in the sunshine. I hope to grow flowers there. There need to be more flowers in this life.
My work is more real to me now than reality is. I intend to spend as much of my remaining time on Earth creating things, making the world of my mind tangible and viewable to others.
I finished a novel for my Tuesday blog posts. I am debating what to plug in there next. I discovered that the scammers at Publish America are being sued in a second class-action suit by authors. I might be able to score some money, even though I never paid them for anything. They have had the rights to my novel Aeroquest bound up in their publishing agreement since 2007. But my contract is long over. I can use that novel on Tuesdays with ample rewriting. And I have published it as four books so far on Amazon.
I have made peace with the idea of never having enough money again. Life continues to cost more than I make. I tried to sign up as an Uber driver for extra cash when I am well enough to drive. Unfortunately, I am only rarely well enough. And even more unfortunately, my Android phone refuses to download either the Uber or the Lyft driver apps. So I am all signed up, but unable to receive even one driving assignment. I just read a literary biography of Poe, though, and even though he was a better writer than I am, he lived in abject poverty for the majority of his adult life. Who am I to do better than he? For that matter, who is James Patterson? I don’t claim to better than him, but he is definitely not better than me. And that dude is a writing millionaire.
That, then, is my “So on and so on…” for today. Thanks for letting me complain. If you read this far through my ramble-brambles, you are a noble and worthy reader. I appreciate you. And I promise you, it gets better from here on.
Catch a Falling Star 
Re-bubbling the Old Enthusiasm
It is getting harder and harder to climb the new day’s hill to get to the summit where I can reasonably get a good look at the road ahead. At almost-64, I can see the road ahead is far shorter and much darker than the highway stretching out behind me. It is not so much a matter of how much time I have spent on the road as it is a matter of the wear and tear the mileage has caused.
This weekend I had another depressing free-book promotion where, in five days, I only moved five books, one purchase, and four free books. I have made $0.45 as an author for the month of June.
I was recently given another bit of good advice from a successful author. He said that I shouldn’t be in such a rush to publish. He suggested taking more time with my writing. Hold on to it longer. Polish it and love it more. And now that I have reached sixteen books published on my author’s page, I have basically beaten the grim reaper in the question of whether or not he was ever going to silence me and my author’s voice. I can afford to live with the next one longer.
But the last one, A Field Guide to Fauns, practically wrote itself. It went fast from inspiration to publication simply because the writer in me was on fire and full of love and life and laughter that had to boil over into hot print exactly as quickly as it did. The additional writing time afforded me by the pandemic and quarantine didn’t hurt either. Once in print, my nudist friends loved it.
This next one has the potential to boil and brew and pop out of me in the same accelerated way as that last one did. Of course, it has been percolating inside my brain basically since the Summer of 1974. So, this is no rushed job. The Wizard in his Keep is a story of a man who tries to take the children of the sister of his childhood best friend to a place of safety when their parents are killed in a car wreck. But the only safe place he has to offer is in the world of his imagination. A world he has bizarrely made real. And that best friend comes searching for the children. And so does a predator who seeks to do them all grievous harm.
In many ways, it is a story already written.
So, I am rekindling the flame that keeps the story-pot boiling. And more of it is already cooking. And I am recovering from the cool winds of disappointment, as well as the dark storm clouds of the nearing future.
This is now actually a two-year-old post. Both of the books mentioned here are published and available from Amazon. As far as holding on to the books longer, there is no problem with that on Amazon. Editing, improving, and re-publishing a book is actually easier than publishing it the first time. Nothing about this old post has been made untrue by the passage of time. I am still probably the best author of books like these whose published books almost never get read.
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