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: 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.)
I posted something on my Facebook profile yesterday, which got a response from someone who had cared for her parents until their deaths. Basically, she was afraid of revisiting being a care-provider by reading Her Final Year – afraid that it would confirm her fear of having been a poor care-giver.
This – *exactly this* – is one of the biggest reasons that I think that Her Final Year can be helpful even for people who are no longer care-givers. Because it shows us making mistakes, failing to do this or that right, learning only too late (or almost too late) that we should have done something differently. From the homepage for the book:
Much of the material in the book is intensely personal, even embarrassing. We have decided to share it ‘warts and all’ because that is the reality of being a long-term care-provider for someone with dementia. You will make mistakes. You will sometimes feel crushed by the isolation and stress. You will get into arguments with family and friends, and even say or do things that you later regret. You will occasionally resent, or even hate, the person for whom you are caring. We did. It’s completely normal, but seeing how others experience these things can be very helpful.
Back in February of 2008, I wrote this:
I’ve also seen others in different forums who have almost felt like they had to defend their own decisions regarding a loved one who has Alzheimer’s or some other debilitating illness leading to hospice care. I’ve witnessed those who almost seem resentful that we did what we did, because it somehow implies that they did less – that they cared less.
No. We were able to make this work out. Barely. Everyone has a different situation, and each family, each person, must come to their own conclusions, their own solutions. None is better or worse than another. Because my wife and I don’t have kids, we didn’t have to juggle that aspect of life at the same time. Because we live here in the same town as Martha Sr, and have professions which allow a considerable flexibility in terms of work hours, we were better able to adapt to providing care at home than most. Our solution worked for our situation – barely. Those final months were very demanding, and I will admit that I was pushed further than I would have thought was possible, and failed and succeeded in ways I never expected.
I will not judge another – this experience has taught me humility.
That was very early in my recovery, less than a month after Martha Sr died. As I got further away from having been a care-provider, I came to see more the mistakes that we *did* make. And I came more to understand that I had to accept those mistakes, those failures, and forgive them.
Putting together Her Final Year was part of that process for me. If you read the book, you will see those mistakes. But hopefully, you will also understand them. Because that is all part of the process of being a care-provider. Just as it is part of being human.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted from the HFY blog.)
Filed under: 2nd Amendment, Alzheimer's, Ballistics, Connections, Guns, Hospice, Politics, Promotion, Publishing, RKBA, Science, Society
Interesting observation: last week I set up two Twitter accounts, one for “HFYJim” to support the care-giving book, the other for “BBTIJim” for my gun-nut stuff. Since then I’ve been learning the ropes about the Twitter culture, getting established, figuring out who to ‘follow’ and gaining a few followers myself. As of this morning, both accounts had about the same number of followers (about a score).
Now, in any sort of social media like this, you’re going to get some amount of SPAM. It’s always interesting to see where, and how it manifests. Just recently, the new Her Final Year blog has started to get some comments which seem OK though generic on the surface but which are actually links to this or that scam website. That tells me that the blog has now started to show up in search engines enough to be something of a target. No big deal, it goes with the territory.
But in the world of Twitter, spam seems to manifest as bogus followers. Not sure why this would be beneficial, but that could just be because I have my computer set up to filter out all the advertising, flash, and pop-up crap from websites. Anyway, of the two accounts I set up at the same time on Twitter, guess which one had attracted a handful of bogus followers who were ostensibly attractive young women with links to ‘pictures’ in their profiles?
It wasn’t the gun-nut one.
Nope. It was the care-giving one. The one tied to AARP, a variety of different Alzheimer’s and hospice organizations, and which I selected to use to follow different news outlets and science bloggers, many of which have significant left-wing political overtones. Not the one tied to a number of firearms-related sites and bloggers, some of which also have a decidedly right-wing political stance.
Curious, that. Now, this is just a snapshot, and it may be that I’ll see the same thing happen with my BBTIJim profile as time goes on. But I thought it was interesting.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to the BBTI blog.)
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Bad Astronomy, Ballistics, Feedback, Hospice, Phil Plait, Promotion, Publishing, Science, YouTube
First, sharing this from Phil Plait:
I’d been familiar with the illusion, but this is a really good demonstration of it. Nice.
A follow-up to this post of last week: ‘Her Majesty’ is still hanging in there, though very weak. She spent a couple of hours sleeping on my chest this morning, purring quietly. Makes it hard for me to get any work done, but I don’t regret the time. At all.
We continue to get excellent reviews and comments about Her Final Year, which makes the lack of sales of the book even more frustrating. Ah well. I won’t be posting a lot here about that book, but you can follow developments on the dedicated blog. We do have a number of big things lined up which may be of interest – reviews in papers and magazines. As those come to fruition I’ll probably mention the most important items.
Oh, if you want, you can now find me on Twitter. I’m still getting the hang of it, but can see why it appeals to some folks a lot.
And another follow-up, this time to a post from several years ago: on Monday we ‘closed’ on the real estate transaction which was the resolution of that whole debacle. The property in question is now ours. There are still some lingering details which need to be dealt with over the next year, but once again that is really someone else’s concern. And now if I never have to deal with the people involved ever again, it’ll be just fine by me, as I am perfectly happy to let this little piece of small-town history finally be buried.
Lastly, yes, we *are* making some headway on the big BBTI revamp and expanded data sets. Remember, the data we collected during the tests in May was almost as much data as we had collected in all the previous tests. Then adding in the .22 tests from June, and I think that did surpass the previous amount.
It’s been a busy and productive year. And it isn’t yet 2/3 done.
Jim Downey
We’re starting to get some good feedback on the book. I posted a full review someone wrote and sent to us over on the HFY blog, thought I’d share a bit of it here as well:
Readers will not find a more real, heartfelt and honest account out there aside from your own personal experience. For folks who have already walked this path, (and could possibly walk it again), this is a must-read book.
It is assuring and comforting to know that as long term care providers to a close family member, our personal feelings and ideals are “normal” and okay. It is in many ways, a personal and solitary journey, but this memoir lets the reader know they are never completely alone.
Go check out the whole thing. If you’ve read the book, and would like to either leave a comment over there or send me a full review, please feel free to do so. Reviews on Amazon are also most welcome. And if you haven’t read the book, then you should go ahead and get a copy of it, right? Right. That’s how this self-publishing thing is supposed to work. Kindle version here, paperback here. Well, go on.
Jim Downey
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
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Bipolar, Book Conservation, Failure, Marketing, Publishing
I mentioned a week ago that I felt “flat”. I still do.
On our walk this morning I was thinking about it, after mentioning to my Good Lady Wife that I felt about ‘half a bubble off’ and that I just didn’t ‘fit into my skin right’ that this is likely just my normal lowpoint in my bipolar cycle. The timing is right, the feeling is right. I hadn’t really noticed it because I had been working so hard to stay focused on getting Her Final Year ready for publication, with all the creative energy that generated.
Work that meant I got very little other, paying, work done, I should add. Meaning that I’m feeling more than a little financial pressure to boot, of the ‘short-term-cash-flow’ variety. That we’ve sold a grand total of 9 books so far isn’t helping my frame of mind – making me more than a little nervous that this is all going to turn out to be one more of my brilliant ideas which is a complete fiasco.
Like I said – hitting or heading towards the lowpoint in my bipolar cycle. Charming, isn’t it?
Ah, well. I know how to walk through this. Focus on the things I *can* do. Conservation work. Marketing the book by writing about it in the proper venues. Water my garden. Put one foot in front of the other. Try and stay healthy, and hope for the best.
We’ll see what happens.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Amazon, Health, Kindle, Promotion, Publishing, Writing stuff
In light of yesterday’s anticipation, today’s official announcement actually has me feeling sorta “flat.”
I’m not sure why. The book is now available in both Kindle and paperback versions, and all the preliminary indicators are that things will go well – we’ve even sold a book already! I should be excited.
Instead, I just feel tired and unmotivated. Odd.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 