Filed under: Alzheimer's, Ballistics, Bipolar, Depression, Failure, Guns, Marketing, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction, Writing stuff
I recently told someone that Communion of Dreams had just been on the verge of publication when the publisher went belly up.
That’s what I hoped happened. I wasn’t exactly sure if it was true.
* * * * * * *
As noted, last year was . . . rough.
I was left hanging by the Publisher Who Shall Not Be Named, who stopped answering my queries about the status of when CoD was going to be out.
In frustration over that, I threw myself into the other projects I had pending. First, the big sequences of BBTI tests. Then getting Her Final Year ready for publication. Then the launch of HFY. Then working on the complete revamp of the BBTI site, and getting *that* launched.
* * * * * * *
Through it all, from one big project to the next, I hoped to strike paydirt. To assuage my frustration over the seeming failure (once again) with Communion of Dreams with success elsewhere.
* * * * * * *
I think Gore Vidal was very insightful:
It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.
* * * * * * * *
I recently told someone that Communion of Dreams had just been on the verge of publication when the publisher went belly up.
That’s what I hoped happened. I wasn’t exactly sure if it was true.
Yesterday, with some trepidation, I looked to see whether it was.
Why trepidation? Because if the PWSNBN had gone belly up, then that wasn’t a judgment on the quality of CoD. It wasn’t yet another rejection. Like I said, 2011 was a rough year.
Well, the PWSNBN still exists, in some nominal sense, as they are trying to push a new software product for publishers. But they haven’t published any other books, and seem to only be making a half-hearted effort at supporting the ones they had published previously. So I guess I at least dodged the bullet of having CoD tied up with that mess.
I was a little surprised that I took no real satisfaction in this. Because last year I had a lot of bitterness about the whole thing. Bitterness which spilled over into other areas of my life, as you can plainly see, and at times got wrapped up with my cyclic depression.
Oh, I am completely capable of schadenfreude. It just seems that in this case I am ready to move on.
Got about one-third of the way through proofing the manuscript yesterday. Hope to finish the work today or tomorrow. Still need to do the forward and acknowledgements and so forth. Then it will be ready for a print-proof of the hard copy version.
Yeah, moving on.
Jim Downey
*This, of course.
Consider first Basham:
Cut to a pleasantly warm evening in Bahrain. My companion, a senior UK investment banker and I, are discussing the most successful banking types we know and what makes them tick. I argue that they often conform to the characteristics displayed by social psychopaths. To my surprise, my friend agrees.
He then makes an astonishing confession: “At one major investment bank for which I worked, we used psychometric testing to recruit social psychopaths because their characteristics exactly suited them to senior corporate finance roles.”
Here was one of the biggest investment banks in the world seeking psychopaths as recruits.
Then Smith:
All corporations are run like this [as dictatorships]. The bonuses are handed out to the people who determine the fate of the CEO. It’s a tiny number of people—ten to 20. There are very few shareholder revolts that work. Most leaders are deposed internally. This is why corporations pay huge bonuses.
And finally Madison:
But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defense must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.
Then draw your own conclusions.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Ballistics, Failure, Guns, Health, Marketing, Predictions, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction, Writing stuff
. . . looking over my New Years post last January is just mostly painful. Because 2011, while it had some good things about it, was mostly just painful. Literally. In many regards, I’d just as soon forget the bulk of it.
But this look-back is something of a tradition, so let’s get it out of the way.
Total downloads of Communion of Dreams dropped off a fair bit in 2011, with just an additional 5,444 versions of the book zipping across the aether. I have long since lost track of the exact number of downloads that makes, but it’s something in excess of 35,000. Yay.
What also dropped off was my focus on the book, as I waited for The Publisher Who Shall Not Be Named to return any of my emails or calls, and turned my attention to other projects. Like getting Her Final Year published. And doing the big BBTI tests and site revamp. And doing a bunch of writing for Guns.com. So it’s not too surprising that interest in CoD waned a bit.
So, not a great year, particularly since most of my other projects didn’t work out like either I hoped or predicted. Still, I stubbornly refuse to learn from my failures, and hope to have a self-published version of Communion of Dreams available “soon.” Maybe even “real soon.” We’ll see.
Meanwhile, let’s all work to make 2012 a better year. Deal?
Jim Downey
Filed under: Art, Depression, Failure, General Musings, Health, Migraine, Predictions, Survival
“So, how’re you doing?”
It’s the sort of question which comes after all the preliminary stuff, all the catching-up with an old friend who I haven’t seen in a couple of years. Your best friends are like that: able to ask the same question that everyone asks, but have it mean something more.
* * * * * * *
This morning I woke up, not hurting.
This was unexpected. Yesterday had been a long day, and I hurt a lot. The source of the pain was just a minor case of post-nasal drip. No, that didn’t hurt. But it caused me to do a fair amount of coughing. That’s what hurt. Yeah, because of the torn intercostal muscle high on my right side, which feels like a broken rib. The one I’ve had for about 16 months now.
So I expected to hurt. In fact, most of the time I expect to hurt.
Chronic pain is different than short-term pain. Oh, I’ve broken plenty of bones, and know what it means to *really* hurt for days, and then to ache for weeks. For a couple of decades now I’ve had a knee which can cause an immense amount of pain if I subject it to the wrong kind of use, and that pain will remain intense for a week or so. Pain is no stranger in my life. Never has been.
But chronic pain, that’s different, as I’ve come to learn. It almost takes on a physical weight, which you have to carry around. That wears you out, sometimes sooner in the day, sometimes later. It functions like a restraint you have to strain against to accomplish anything. It’s like having a migraine – a full fledged, nausea-inducing, sparkly lights & mild vertigo migraine – and still having to drive over an icy road into the sun.
* * * * * * *
My garden still hasn’t been put to bed for the year. Yeah, it’s really late.
It’s just one manifestation of how this year has gone. Everything has taken longer than I expected, cost more than I thought it would, and didn’t work out quite the way I hoped it to.
Partly this is due to the chronic pain. Partly it is due to mistakes on my part. Partly it is just because of chance. By turns this has made me depressed, disappointed, disgusted. Sometimes even on the brink of despair.
And yet…
* * * * * * *
“So, how’re you doing?”
It’s the sort of question which comes after all the preliminary stuff, all the catching-up with an old friend who I haven’t seen in a couple of years. Your best friends are like that: able to ask the same question that everyone asks, but have it mean something more. I am fortunate enough to have several such close friends.
“It’s been a long year. And not a good one.” I looked at my friend. She nodded. “But I’ve had worse. And I’ve had an idea about a new story I want to tell…”
Jim Downey
Filed under: BoingBoing, Civil Rights, Failure, Government, Science, Science Fiction, Society, Steampunk, Terrorism, Travel, Wired
Via BB, an item in Wired from an insider telling all of us what we already know: that Airport Security is nothing but an expensive farce, based on bad science:
TSA is trying to get away from its stigma of being the guys who grope and photograph you. It’s taking the porno out of the scanners by getting rid of the “nude” imaging displays. Its director, John Pistole, talks about becoming an “intelligence driven” agency that compiles behavioral profiles of potential terrorists and — someday — targeting its toughest screening on only those who fit the profile. Kids no longer have to take their shoes off before boarding a plane.
Just one problem, according to Brandt: The behavioral science is no panacea. “The scientific community is divided as to whether behavioral detection of terrorists is viable,” he writes. According to the Government Accountability Office, TSA put together a behavioral profiling program “without first validating the scientific basis for identifying suspicious passengers in an airport environment.” Even if the science was sound, the office found last year, TSA officers “lack a mechanism to input data on suspicious passengers into a database used by TSA analysts and also lack a means to obtain information from the Transportation System Operations Center on a timely basis.”
It’s like the government awarded military contracts during the Civil War for the development of æther craft in order to defeat the South – makes for a good story, perhaps, but has little or nothing to do with reality.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Ballistics, Failure, Feedback, Guns, Marketing, Music, Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, Writing stuff
I’m a blockhead.
No, really. Samuel Johnson’s quote establishes it beyond a doubt:
“No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.”
For years I listened to people go on and on about how beneficial my writing about being a care-giver was. All the praise, the sharing, the requests to write more, to collect my writings into a book. The final result has been for Her Final Year to sell a grand total of 32 copies, after years of work and months of flogging the book. What a staggering success.
Yup, a blockhead.
Also for years now I’ve listened to countless proclamations of how incredible and valuable Ballistics By The Inch is. How it is an amazing resource for anyone interested in hard data. This has been in discussions on different forums and blogs which I have stumbled upon. And it’s reflected in the hits & usage of the site, as well, with over 8 million hits total and something on the order of 500,000 unique visitors. There’ve been plenty of people who have written me, thanking me, telling me that we should accept donations to support our work. So, for the re-launch we have done just that – added a way for people to show how much they value the site with a small donation. And in the short time we’ve had the new site up we’ve had over 5,000 unique visitors, and gotten just one donation of $10. At that rate, we’d have gotten a stunning total of $1,000 in donations since the start – it wouldn’t even cover the cost of hosting the website.
Yup, a blockhead.
My novel has been downloaded over 35,000 times in the last 5 years. People have told me they love it, that it’s brilliant and just like the classic SF of the golden era. Sometime in the next few weeks we’ll offer a self-published version of the book in hardcopy and for the Kindle. And I’m not so much a blockhead that I expect to actually sell copies of the thing. But I bet – I just bet – that somehow I’ll manage to be disappointed, nonetheless. Probably when I start getting complaints that the book is no longer free.
Screw it. I swear, I am seriously tempted to just shut down all the websites. Yup, BBTI too. Just leave a brief description of the project up with an email address where people can contact me to buy access to the data. Like the song says:
Little Joe never once gave it away
Everybody had to pay and pay
A hustle here and a hustle there
New York City’s the place where
They said hey babe, take a walk on the wild side
They said hey Joe, take a walk on the wild side
But being a blockhead, we’ll see what happens.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to the BBTI blog.)
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Amazon, Failure, Predictions, Promotion, Publishing, Writing stuff
As I’ve said before, traditional publishing is essentially broken. My experiences with working with a small independent publisher to get Communion of Dreams to press, and having that go screwy only confirm my thoughts on the matter. Certainly, the process of trying to find a publisher for CoD and then a year ago for Her Final Year haven’t changed my mind at all.
So it doesn’t break my heart to read an article like this:
Amazon Signs Up Authors, Writing Publishers Out of Deal
SEATTLE — Amazon.com has taught readers that they do not need bookstores. Now it is encouraging writers to cast aside their publishers.
Amazon will publish 122 books this fall in an array of genres, in both physical and e-book form. It is a striking acceleration of the retailer’s fledging publishing program that will place Amazon squarely in competition with the New York houses that are also its most prominent suppliers.
* * *
Publishers say Amazon is aggressively wooing some of their top authors. And the company is gnawing away at the services that publishers, critics and agents used to provide.
Her Final Year hasn’t yet found the audience I expected it would. Maybe it never will. Maybe it would with a major publishing house behind it. Maybe we’ll just get lucky, and get some good word-of-mouth going on it (you can help, hint, hint…).
But regardless, Communion of Dreams (my novel) has been downloaded over 33,000 times in the last four years, and by any measure that’s an indication that there is an audience out there for it. Yet my years of trying to find a publisher for it have always ended in frustration – even after I had received an offer to publish it, as well as communications from several other publishers that they thought it was an excellent book, but ‘just not quite what we’re looking for…’
So yeah, forgive me if I don’t shed a tear for the traditional publishers, and whatever services they supposedly provided. Self-publishing is the new reality. If Amazon wants to tie into that with a new model for publishing, then good – it can’t be any worse than the way things don’t work now.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to the Her Final Year blog.)
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.
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Failure, Feedback, Gardening, Hospice, Marketing, Predictions, Preparedness, Promotion, Publishing, Society, Travel
A good friend was visiting last weekend. We see each other fairly often, communicate regularly. But there are things best discussed in person.
“How’s your mom doing?”
“Not bad. I think we’re getting to the point where we need to have that conversation about her driving.”
“Ah. That’s a hard one.”
“Yeah. But my sister largely drives her everywhere as it is, anyway. So that will make it easier.”
* * * * * * *
I mentioned a week ago that I was surprised that Her Final Year hasn’t done better.
Well, I had been waiting for a couple of additional pieces to appear in different publications in the hopes that would spur awareness of the book, as well as sales. One of those being my college alumni magazine. Yesterday I saw that they had posted the Fall 2011 issue as a .pdf on their website, so I took a look.
It’s a blurb, not a review. You can find it at the bottom of page 39, if you want. Next to another book blurb, and one of about a dozen in this issue. My fellow alumni are intelligent, accomplished people.
* * * * * * *
After discovering that, I went out to pick tomatoes from my garden. The very wet summer we had meant that there was a big delay in a bunch of the tomato plants blooming and setting fruit. But I am lucky, since many people I know have had a horrible year for tomatoes, while mine were just delayed.
I was able to pick about 25 pounds of tomatoes, a nice mix of Lemon Boy and Brandywine and Black Prince and Better Boy. Most look great, have a wonderful taste. We had some with BLTs last night for dinner, and I made up two quarts of sauce from the ones with slight blemishes. I’ll probably go ahead and can or sauce the rest in the next day or two.
But I didn’t get to picking them for about two hours, because first I had to completely re-do the netting around the garden (about 40×50). Deer had gotten in, then tore the hell out of everything getting out.
Yeah, they munched on the tomato plants, and that was annoying. But they also ate the tops out of my habanero plants. Well, not all of them. Just the ones which had done the best.
See, as bad as the summer was on tomatoes, it was worse on the habaneros. They just started setting fruit a couple of weeks ago. And it was a race to see whether any of the pods ripened fully before I leave for New Zealand.
Now I doubt whether any of the pods will ripen. Oh, the deer stayed away from the fruit. But with the bulk of the leaves eaten out of the top, I don’t know whether they can ripen. We’ll see.
* * * * * * *
A dear friend used to always say “Live as if you were going to die tomorrow. Plan as if you will live forever.”
She passed away over 20 years ago from breast cancer.
* * * * * * *
“Still, once you tell her that she has to stop driving, things change.”
“I know.” He looked at me. “I got copies of your book for all four of my siblings. Told them to read it.”
“Thanks.”
“No, thank you – I don’t think any of them have really thought through how this is likely to go with Mom.”
“Every experience is different.”
“Yeah, but at least having *some* idea of what to plan for, what to watch for, will help.”
Jim Downey
*from this. Cross posted to the HFY blog.
Filed under: BoingBoing, Civil Rights, Constitution, Failure, Government, Society, Star Wars
Via BB, an interesting news item:
Couple in shock after drug raid
ROSWELL, N.M. (KRQE) – A massive drug raid in Roswell last week targeted dozens of people at homes across the city.
But one of those homes didn’t have what police were looking for, and their unexpected visit left the people inside shaken and upset.
* * *
She said her husband opened the door to multiple officers in raid gear with guns drawn.
“We were completely shocked, upset,” she continued. “I was panicked because I’ve never had anything like this happen to us before, never.”
She said the officers demanded to come inside her home.
“And my husband asked, ‘Do you have a warrant? Who are you looking for?’ and they said, ‘Gerald Sentell,'” Parker said. “We don’t even know this person.”
OK, at this point, what usually happens in these situations is the DEA or other law enforcement agency comes in, ‘secures’ the house (including putting occupants on the ground, perhaps with handcuffs or suchlike, and if there are any dogs…), does their search and any apologies or reparations for damage to the house comes later after a big public outcry.
What happened this time?
Parker said she and her husband were wary of cooperating because they weren’t sure what was going on.
When asked if she thought the officers could have been imposters, Parker replied, “Yes. That’s very much what we thought, and that’s why my husband said no, you’re not coming in this house without a warrant.”
The DEA spokesperson said the agents left when they were denied entry by the couple.
* * *
The DEA said all of the officers involved in the raid were following procedure and did nothing wrong.
Huh.
This both delights me, and outrages/frightens me.
I mean, I’m glad that Mr. Parker seems to have Jedi mind-control powers (not to mention the presence of mind to ask for a warrant under these circumstances) and so avoided going through the additional trauma usually inflicted on citizens in this situation. Seriously – that’s great. His door is still on the hinges, no shots were fired, the DEA actually respected his constitutional rights. Wonderful!
But the “following procedure” statement outrages me. So the DEA procedure is to conduct these raids without a warrant?
Really?
Think about that.
Then think about the fact that this probably comes as a surprise. I know it did to me. No, not that the DEA raid was conducted without a warrant (I call that stupid, but not terribly surprising). What’s surprising is that they didn’t just go ahead and conduct the raid, anyway, once they were there, under the pretense that one of the agents “smelled something” or “thought he saw drug paraphernalia” or some other excuse. Because that’s the usual script in these cases.
Yeah, it’s surprising that the DEA actually respected the 4th Amendment.
That should scare the hell out of you.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 