First they came for the air travelers,
and I didn’t speak out because I almost never fly*.
Then they came for the train riders,
and I didn’t speak out because I don’t ride the train.
Then they came for the Greyhound riders,
and I didn’t speak out because I don’t ride the bus.
Then the came for the truck drivers,
and I didn’t speak out because I don’t drive a truck.
Then they came for me
and by then no one cared about liberty.
Jim Downey
*of course, tomorrow I am, and then again on Tuesday. So I’ll probably regret this. Which says a lot, right there.
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.
September winds down. The leaves here in central Missouri are starting to change. This weekend Martha and I will celebrate being married for 24 years.
As the first World Alzheimer’s Month comes to a close I am waiting for at least two more publications who are doing stories on Her Final Year. There is an odd frisson, a sensation almost like standing on a cliff, looking out over a vista because I am afraid to look straight down to the river below. Is this an ending, or a beginning?
And I am reminded of this passage, originally written 5 days before Martha Sr died, now in the month of “December: Passing“:
There is something to this of that bittersweet moment, that sense of coming to conclusions you know are there, the resolution of conversations and plot lines that you get at the end of a cherished book. She no longer needs to wait for the usual markers of the day – when to get up, when to eat, when to nap. She got up this morning, and the rest of the day has followed as best we can to her wants and desires. Lunch an hour early, and including her favorite soup even though she just had it yesterday. (Campbell’s Tomato, if you want to know.) Supper about a half hour early. Bed more than an hour early. Because that is what she wanted.
Her worries we have answered as best we can, telling her that tomorrow we will see if we can help her find “the people she came here with.”
Unless she finds them on her own in her sleep.
We don’t always recognize the moments of change in our lives, or what they mean.
But sometimes, we do.
Jim D.
(Cross posted from the HFY blog.)
Filed under: Connections, Gardening, Predictions, Promotion, Publishing, Writing stuff
I brought in about 15 pounds of tomatoes from the garden this morning.
* * * * * * *
We’re a bit over two weeks in on having Her Final Year published. Details about how it is going here, but basically we’ve been busy getting everything in place, getting the word out, and hoping that one of these days all our promotional efforts will begin to pay off.
* * * * * * *
An old friend dropped me a note this morning, announcing that she’s again returning to blogging after a longish break while she got an advanced degree.
Reviving a blog is not unlike reviving a garden plot, or returning to a book you started and then let lie. There’s weeding to be done, of course. And you sometimes have to dig a bit to condition the soil, find the richness that is waiting there. Cultivation sometimes takes a while to really take hold, and it can seem like all you are doing is pouring energy into the enterprise without much hope of return.
But as any good gardener or writer knows, that hard work early on pays off later, sometimes in ways you cannot predict. Sue is an excellent writer, and a hell of a gardener, and I would invite you to add her blog to your regular reading. It may seem to be Colorado oriented, but I know from her previous writing that you’ll find a lot there to enjoy and think about over time.
* * * * * * *
For the latest HFY blog post, I pulled up the Wikipedia page on myself. Wow – that really needs to be updated. It doesn’t have anything about my writing for guns.com, and of course nothing yet about Her Final Year. Early last year I added some info about the whole BBTI project, but I have always been reluctant about messing around with my own Wiki entry (as the guidelines appropriately indicate). If anyone is feeling charitable and would like to spend a bit of time, your help and objectivity would be much appreciated.
* * * * * * *
I brought in about 15 pounds of tomatoes from the garden this morning. A real mix of varietals, too: Early Girls, Brandywines, Lemon Boys, even some Big Boys (I think).
This was the first big batch. Previously, it’d only been a couple of this or that – enough to satisfy my love of having fresh toms for a salad or a snack. But now I have enough to do something with them – probably the first batch of sauce. And from the looks of things on the plants, soon there will be a veritable avalanche – enough so I’ll need to make time to do some serious canning.
This makes me happy. I love to have home-canned tomatoes through the year, and usually try to put up about 60 quarts or so. It’s a lot of work for a few weeks, but it is so very worth it down the line.
Like many things. Or so we hope.
Jim Downey
From Chapter 3 of Communion of Dreams:
The image of Seth disappeared, to be replaced by what seemed to be a miniature landscape of hills, a road, a small river, and a bridge. On one of the hills appeared a small person, looking around as though trying to find something. Ling commenced to play with the controls on the side of the projector. Jon didn’t recognize the game, looked to Klee.
The German smiled. In English he said, “No, it’s probably not a game you’ve ever played. It’s a little something Seth and I came up with to help her learn the fundamentals of game theory. In this first level, she has to learn how to communicate with the figure, and agree on a meeting place. The obvious choice is dictated by the terrain features: where the road crosses the river, there is a bridge. That is a unique point in the landscape, and hence a good starting point to establish a reference. The game goes on to introduce other concepts,using a variety of terrain features, multiple players, tacit and explicit communication, cooperation, and competition. She’s quite good at it, and no matter which variables the machine uses, Ling sees the essential key to each scenario quickly. Soon she’ll have mastered the principles of a zero-sum game, and we’ll move on to other lessons.”
* * * * * * *
Via BoingBoing:
‘Sleepy market town’ surrounded by ring of car cameras
Despite low levels of crime, police are installing a network of automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) cameras around historic Royston, Herts.
Police claim the devices will help catch criminals as Royston lies close to the borders of three counties and is the juncture of several main roads.
However, opponents claim the scheme is “grossly disproportionate”, an invasion of residents’ privacy and an unlawful expansion of Britain’s Big Brother state.
The system records the number plates of all vehicles passing through the cameras, logging their details in national database for up to five years.
* * * * * * *
It’s not the first time it’s been done, of course, though this is a somewhat larger scale. And after all, why should we worry? The use of surveillance cameras and other scanners is popular. It makes people feel safer. And if you aren’t doing anything wrong, why should you care?
Control the rules, and you control the game. See you at the crossroads.
Jim Downey
As noted, I’ve been more than a bit preoccupied with something else of late. But I do want to take a moment and pass along this delightful tribute, via Phil Plait:
I was never a hard-core Shuttle fan. The whole project was a series of compromises, both political and technological, and it never lived up to the original promise. And yet . . .
. . . and yet even with all that being true, the Shuttle, and the people who made it work, undeniably accomplished remarkable things. It would be churlish to say otherwise, just because it didn’t meet my youthful expectations.
We all compromise in the face of reality. But those who still manage to create the future even with that limitation deserve our honor, and our praise. Life is short, and the stars are far away.
Jim Downey
Well, I think we’re about ready to launch Her Final Year. Preliminary feedback on the website has all been very good – seems that the site works for a variety of different platforms and browsers. The book is still working its way through the Amazon system, is available on our e-commerce site as well as through the Kindle Store but not yet in Amazon’s general titles – though I expect that will change sometime today. The first shipment of paperbacks should arrive sometime today or tomorrow, and they can then be sent to those who helped us along the way as a thank-you. We’ve started to contact media outlets, and I already know that the newspaper I used to write for is planning on doing a piece about the book. And I’ve started to work up an article for guns.com about “Alzheimer’s & firearms.” Announcements are being made to send to friends and colleagues. In short, we’re almost ready.
It feels like those last moments waiting for a thrill ride, where the announcement comes over the loudspeaker reminding you to keep your hands and feet inside the car. The adrenaline surges, your hair stands on end, and a stupid half-fearful smile tries to form on your lips. In a moment, it will all start, and only then will you find out whether the ride was worth the cost of admission.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to the HFY blog.)
Communion Of Dreams 