Do yourself a favor, and watch this:
(Remember to run it full screen, in HD, for best effect.)
Jim Downey
Filed under: Art, Failure, Gardening, Predictions, Publishing, Writing stuff
Six years ago I wrote the following for my newspaper column:
This is the heavy harvest time for my garden. I’ve been bringing in 20-plus pounds of tomatoes daily: sweet golden tomatoes that make a perfect sauce, meaty Romas great for salsa or drying, Celebrity and Brandywine tomatoes chopped up and canned for enjoyment later. I’ve also got bell peppers warming to red, brilliant Cayennes for a little spice, and hot hot hot Habaneros to roast and use in sauces to shake off winter’s deepest chill. All thanks to the extra time and work I put in this spring, prepping the ground, selecting plants, laying the soaker hoses, putting down a thick mat of straw to retain moisture and keep out weeds.
I was reminded of this passage this morning as I harvested what could well be the last tomatoes of this season. It’s been a late harvest this year, delayed by a very wet early summer, but the fall has stayed warm long enough that in the last few days I’ve brought in over 100 pounds of just beautiful tomatoes. They now cover the kitchen counter two deep, and I have already cooked up about two gallons of thick sauce. Friends will come by over the next day or two to collect a portion, and my good lady wife and I are gorging ourselves on them, enjoying fresh, flavorful tomatoes while they’re here.
* * * * * * *
The subject of that column, Naoma Powell, is still alive, though her fall season is now also coming to a close. We recently attended a special event honoring her and the program she nurtured for so long. Naoma was able to attend for a while, happy to be surrounded by those who still love and respect her, even if she was no longer sure who they were.
It was a well attended event, and I was surprised by how many of the people I knew. My roots into the arts community here are still deep, even after long years of neglect. I closed the gallery over 7 years ago, and stopped writing my column on the arts at the end of 2006, when the demands of care-giving for Martha Sr because such that I could no longer reliably maintain involvement with the community.
I’m not thinking of opening another gallery or anything like that. Legacy Art was a good experience on the whole, though the financial losses were quite painful. For a long time I carried a bitterness over the difference between what people professed (supporting the arts) and what they actually did (not opening their wallets to actually buy art). But that bitterness has mellowed, perhaps ripened.
* * * * * * *
You know how when you try a new tomato varietal, you can’t be entirely sure what you’re getting yourself in for? I mean, yeah, it’s a tomato, and will fall within a certain range of flavor profiles. But a Lemon Boy tomato tastes completely differently than a Brandywine does. You just have to dive in and try it, savoring it for what it is rather than what you expect it to be.
One variety I tried growing this year is like that: “Black Prince” It has a dark, earthy flavor I didn’t really expect. But I have come to enjoy it a great deal for what it is, and the plants are doing quite well this late in the season.
Expectations are like that. I expected that our book would be a lot more popular than what it has turned out to be. For a while I was again bitter at the disappointment, feeling that I had made the same mistake that I had made previously with the gallery, believing what people professed rather than what they actually did.
But the truth is, you can’t know what people are going to do, until they do it. All you can do is plan, and prepare, tend your garden to the best of your ability. And then hope that the weather favors you, and that the harvest, when it comes, brings something you enjoy.
Jim Downey
Cross posted from the HFY blog.
I’ve always loved Tery Fugate-Wilcox’s phrase “Without art, we are but monkeys with car keys.”
And it looks like you can push that differentiation back a lot further than we previously thought:
Ancient ‘paint factory’ unearthed
The kits used by humans 100,000 years ago to make paint have been found at the famous archaeological site of Blombos Cave in South Africa.
The hoard includes red and yellow pigments, shell containers, and the grinding cobbles and bone spatulas to work up a paste – everything an ancient artist might need in their workshop.
This extraordinary discovery is reported in the journal Science.
It is proof, say researchers, of our early ancestors’ complexity of thought.
“This is significant because it is pushing back the boundaries of our understanding of when Homo sapiens – people like us – first became modern,” said Prof Christopher Henshilwood from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.
There has been other evidence of early human art, shell jewelry and carvings which date back almost as far. But this latest discovery shows a level of planning and preparation which clearly indicate complex thought – it is the difference between a toddler picking up a rock and marking a wall and someone finding just the right rock, crushing it, adding in several other quite different but necessary ingredients in the proper proportions, mixing them all together in order to make a paint with which to mark the same wall.
Fascinating.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Art, Ballistics, Guns, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction, Society, Writing stuff
As a side-line, I’m a writer for Guns.com. Mostly what are called ‘features’ but are actually akin to a newspaper column, plus some reviews and other things now and again. I generally write about one piece a week. It’s fun, they let me write about just anything I want, and I like the discipline of sitting down to write a column of a specific length and focus as I did when I was writing about the arts for my local paper. It doesn’t pay much, but for the approximately 20,000 words I’ve written for them this year, I’ve made over a thousand dollars. And I’m told by my editor that I’m considered one of the best and most popular writers for the site, but that could just be blowing smoke. Regardless, I know that thousands of people see almost everything I write there, and the direct feedback I get is very positive. I consider the hour or two I put into writing each article to be time well spent.
So far this month we haven’t sold any copies of Her Final Year. Last month we sold 11. All told, we’ve sold about 30. That’s about 10% of what we need to sell just to break even on out-of-pocket expenses.
I’m honestly surprised by this. Oh, I know that it takes time for word to get around, that times are tight for people. Et cetera. But by about this point in time, my novel had been downloaded over 2,000 times (currently the total is well over 30,000 downloads). And that launched with less of a promotional effort than we put behind HFY, without the supporting structures of social media and forums dedicated to care-giving.
Granted, Communion of Dreams is free. But it is also just an e-book. You can’t (yet) get a paperback copy of it to keep, or to give as a gift. And while I think that it is well written, Her Final Year is a much better and more powerful book.
This isn’t meant to be a “woe is me, please buy my book” plea. Rather, it is just an observation on what is valued by our culture. Writing about firearms is. I get paid for that, and know that it is well received. Writing fiction is. Word of my novel spread widely, and it remains popular (some 636 people downloaded it last month.) Even writing about the arts was valued – my newspaper columns generated a little income, and were once again fairly popular.
Writing about care-giving? Not so much, it seems. I wonder why that is.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted from the HFY blog.)
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Art, General Musings, NPR, Society, Survival, Writing stuff
Saturday afternoon they announced a new “Three Minute Fiction” contest on NPR. Here’s a bit about the theme this time around:
Round 7 Rules
Your story must have somebody arriving in town and somebody leaving town.
Your story must be 600 words or fewer. One entry per person. your deadline is 11:59 p.m. ET on Sunday, Sept. 25.
* * * * * * *
Had a nice bump up in downloads of Communion of Dreams so far this month. About 270 copies already. I’ve really stopped keeping track, but that puts it somewhere about 32,000 downloads so far.
Which has gotten me thinking. After going through and preparing the manuscript to self-publish Her Final Year, I know what is involved in that. It’d be simplicity itself to set things up to self-publish CoD. Given that I haven’t heard squat from Trapdoor books about publishing the book since the start of the year, I’ve given up on that possibility.
Then again, I am very disappointed in the sales of Her Final Year, since we’ve only sold about 10% of what we needed to sell in order to just break even on the costs of setting that up. I mean, we’re talking only a couple of dozen books so far. Damned depressing, especially given how much everyone has said that there is a huge need for the book and how good it is.
So, is it worth it? Would you actually buy a copy of Communion of Dreams?
And can I actually trust that?
* * * * * * *
There was an interesting item on Morning Edition this morning, about a relatively new kind of psychotherapy in use with people facing the end of life. It’s called Dignity Therapy. Here’s an excerpt from the story:
The something that Chochenoff decided to create was a formal written narrative of the patient’s life — a document that could be passed on to whomever they chose. The patients would be asked a series of questions about their life history and the parts they remember most or think are most important. Their answers would be transcribed and presented to them for editing until, after going back and forth with the therapist, a polished document resulted that could be passed on to the people that they loved.
Chochenoff named this process dignity therapy, and for the last 10 years he has used it with the dying. And one of the things that has struck him about the processes is this: The stories we tell about ourselves at the end of our lives are often very different than the stories that we tell about ourselves at other points.
“When you are standing at death’s door and you have a chance to say something to someone, I absolutely think that that proximity to death is going to influence the words that come out of your mouth,” Chochenoff says.
* * * * * * *
I by-and-large hid from all the 9/11 memorials over the weekend.
I have plenty of experience in dealing with traumatic loss. For me, remembering a loved one who has died is important, but so is moving on with life. And I can’t do that by constantly poking at the empty place left in my heart.
I know that I am different from most people in this way. Or at least I assume that I am, based on what I see. And I’m not just talking about the 9/11 memorials all weekend.
Recently, I was contacted by a gentleman who was doing some research for an ‘online memorial’ site. He wanted some details on my father’s death, along with specifics as to his burial location and my mom’s. He was polite about it, but somewhat surprisingly insistent almost to the point of annoyance.
I found this odd, and did a little checking. Turns out this fellow is part of something I call “competitive memorializing” – there’s a whole online community of these folks, who just like trying to see how many such memorials that they can create. Not for loved ones, or people they knew, either. Just total strangers who they for whatever reason decide they should “memorialize.” Who knew?
And here’s a small confession: I didn’t have most of the information this fellow was wanting. It’s just not important to me to remember my dad that way. His body was just a shell – it was what his life was that matters.
* * * * * * *
Saturday afternoon they announced a new “Three Minute Fiction” contest on NPR. Here’s a bit about the theme this time around:
Round 7 Rules
Your story must have somebody arriving in town and somebody leaving town.
Your story must be 600 words or fewer. One entry per person. your deadline is 11:59 p.m. ET on Sunday, Sept. 25.
I have some thoughts on this, tied to the ideas of memory and memorials and the things I have said above.
Because the stories we tell are important.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to the HFY blog.)
Yeah, I remember that show. Very fun:
Very fun, indeed. Story behind it here.
Jim Downey
PS: we’ve got a 10% discount going this weekend on copies of Her Final Year.
Filed under: Art, Astronomy, Heinlein, Jefferson Starship, Music, Robert A. Heinlein
Lovely:
Simply lovely.
Jim Downey
*And yes, that would have made a great soundtrack for the vid.
I’ve mentioned previously my Paint the Moon conceptual art project, and how it got started. Recently I noted to a friend that sometime in May was the 10th anniversary of the initial idea for the whole thing. His reaction was that I should do it again, or at least hold a ‘virtual party’ to celebrate the whole thing.
I demurred, for a couple of reasons. One, I have a lot of other irons in the fire currently. Two, part of the charm of the whole thing was the freshness of the idea – trying to recapture that naive moment would likely fall flat. And three, this is a different world we live in these days from the one pre-9/11. On that last point, this news item is relevant:
People who point powerful lasers at planes and helicopters — which can temporarily blind pilots — could face fines as high as $11,000 per violation, the head of the Federal Aviation Administration said Wednesday.
* * *
Pilots have reported over 1,100 such incidents in the U.S. so far this year, and officials said they are concerned that eventually there will be an air crash.
The incidents have increased rapidly around the world over the past six years as online sales of new, powerful handheld lasers have soared. In 2005, there were fewer than 300 such incidents reported in the U.S. Last year, there were 2,836 incidents. In some cases pilots have had to relinquish control of an aircraft to a co-pilot because of vision loss.
Yeah, it’s a different world now – one where an effort to create such a work of art would likely get me branded as some kind of terrorist.
More’s the pity.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 