Filed under: Amazon, Connections, Failure, Feedback, Flu, Health, Kindle, Marketing, NPR, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction, tech | Tags: Amazon, blogging, Christmas, Communion of Dreams, direct publishing, free, health, jim downey, Kindle, literature, NPR, promotion, publishing, Science Fiction, self-publishing, Simon & Schuster, technology
I’ve been sick with the current nasty version of cold/flu going around, so I missed writing about this:
They used to call it the “vanity press,” and the phrase itself spoke volumes. Self-published authors were considered not good enough to get a real publishing contract. They had to pay to see their book in print. But with the advent of e-books, self-publishing has exploded, and a handful of writers have had huge best-sellers.
True, of course, but the piece is also about how the ‘traditional’ publishing houses are now trying to get in on the self-publishing market:
There have been more and more self-publishing successes recently, and the audiences are growing by leaps and bounds, says Carolyn Reidy. She’s the CEO of Simon & Schuster, which recently announced that it’s launching a new self-publishing service. If traditional publishers want to survive, Reidy says, they have to keep up with the rapid changes taking place in the industry. The growth of self-publishing is one of them.
“We actually understand that it is a different world than what we do,” she says. “We want to understand it, and if it is going to … be a threat to our business, we definitely want to understand it and also see how we can turn that to our advantage. And one of the advantages is, it is a great way to find authors, also new genres and new audiences.”
Because I’ve been sick, perhaps, my attitude is “screw ’em.” Yes, I would like to have my books readily available in brick & mortar stores. And realistically, that’s only practical through a traditional publishing house.
But as I have said and documented here for almost six years now, traditional publishing is broken. The major publishers were too inflexible in the face of changing technology, and entirely too insular & inbred in how they sought out new authors. If you were famous or had a connection inside the industry, you had a chance of getting noticed, otherwise it was nothing but a lottery with little or no regard for quality.
I certainly haven’t hit the big time with self-publishing. And I have had to work a lot harder at promotion. But I am *very* happy with how it has gone, and I really appreciate all the help I have gotten from my readers. Thanks, everyone!
And to that end, let’s do a “free download” day for Christmas: The Kindle edition of Communion of Dreams will be free to download all day. So if you don’t have the book, get it! And if you know someone who you think might enjoy it, tell them about the promotion!
Merry Christmas!
Jim Downey
Filed under: Health, Science Fiction | Tags: Bene Gesserit, blogging, Dune, Frank Herbert, health, jim downey, pain, Science Fiction
There is no pain.
Pain is the mind-killer.
Pain is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my pain.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the pain has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.
Jim Downey
*With apologies to Frank Herbert, for all my friends who suffer chronic pain of any sort.
Filed under: Amazon, Connections, Discover, Failure, Feedback, General Musings, Health, Kindle, Marketing, Predictions, Promotion, Publishing, Science, Science Fiction, Writing stuff | Tags: Amazon, art, blepharitis, blogging, Communion of Dreams, direct publishing, fMRI, health, Jane Austin, jim downey, Kickstarter, Kindle, literature, Natalie Phillips, NPR, predictions, promotion, science, Science Fiction, St. Cybi's Well, writing
All my adult life I’ve suffered from chronic blepharitis — usually mild, with occasional annoying flare-ups.
* * * * * * *
“A lot of would-be professional writers dream of someday getting a book contract that includes an advance: enough money, paid up front, to let them quit their day job and write full time. Of course those advances do come with an expectation that an author will actually write the book. The Penguin Publishing Group recently filed suit against a dozen authors who failed to produce manuscripts after getting advances.”
That’s the intro to an NPR story which ran this morning. It’s worth listening to if you haven’t heard it, for the statements of clueless entitlement from some of the authors involved if nothing else.
I heard about this story when it first made the rounds a couple of weeks ago. I considered writing about it then, but I had just launched my Kickstarter, and I didn’t want to come across as having sour grapes or whining about the large advances celebrity authors can command from the conventional publishing houses.
But seriously, this stuff is nuts. Who in their right mind would think that you could sign a contract for $325,000 with a $81,250 advance, and then not provide a manuscript for six years? I mean, I know that publishing is ‘broken’ , but that’s ridiculous — from both sides of the equation.
* * * * * * *
And speaking of Jane Austin (see link just above), another interesting story this morning on NPR is worth consideration:
A Lively Mind: Your Brain On Jane Austen
At a recent academic conference, Michigan State University professor Natalie Phillips stole a glance around the room. A speaker was talking but the audience was fidgety. Some people were conferring among themselves, or reading notes. One person had dozed off.
Phillips, who studies 18th- and 19th-century literature, says the distracted audience made something pop in her head. Distractability is a theme that runs through many novels of Jane Austen, whom Phillips admires. It occurred to Phillips that there was a paradox in her own life when it came to distractability.
“I love reading, and I am someone who can actually become so absorbed in a novel that I really think the house could possibly burn down around me and I wouldn’t notice,” she said. “And I’m simultaneously someone who loses their keys at least three times a day, and I often can’t remember where in the world I parked my car.”
Phillips decided to investigate this, setting up an experiment where she had people read passages from Austin while in a functional MRI scanner. She set it up so that the readers were supposed to either just be ‘browsing’ the text, or to be fully devoting their attention to it.
What did she find?
Well, first, this was just a limited study, and the results are preliminary. And there are problems with trying to use fMRI to pin-point what portions of the brain are involved in cognition.
But what is interesting is that when the readers were fully engaged — devoting their entire attention to the passages in deep reading — their entire brain seemed to be activated.
I think anyone who has ever completely lost themselves in a book will find this hardly surprising. And, as an author who attempts to completely paint a realistic ‘world’ for people to enjoy in my novels, it’s heartening to know that science seems to back up personal experience.
* * * * * * *
All my adult life I’ve suffered from chronic blepharitis — usually mild, with occasional annoying flare-ups.
This next bit is a little gross. My apologies.
Typically, when I have a flare-up of my blepharitis, a few days of warm compresses and some antibiotic ointment take care of it. But this latest round has proven to be a bit more of a hassle.
A couple of weeks ago I felt like I got a bit of something stuck in the orbit of my left eye. Probably a small eyelash or flake of skin — this has happened before. It’ll work its way out eventually. And I think this morning it did, because there was a small gloopy bit of pus which I fished out from under my lower lid.
Like I said, a bit gross. Sorry.
But it’s a natural reaction of the body, and I suspect that now the blepharitis will clear up with the usual treatment.
And as I was taking care of this this morning, I was thinking about the next book. I’m doing this a lot, lately. As it notes on the brief blurb about St. Cybi’s Well, the main character is dealing with an eye disease which threatens his career when the book starts. I don’t want to get into too much detail, but I have very specific reasons for why this is, and what it means for the overall story line (including what plays out in Communion of Dreams). There is a long tradition in literature and mythology about the symbolism of a character who has eye problems, and a lot of that comes into play.
But I couldn’t help but note my own connection in this way, and how sometimes it might be a bit overdoing-it to so completely manifest what is happening in my own mind’s eye.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Amazon, Art, Ballistics, Book Conservation, Connections, Emergency, General Musings, Health, Kindle, Marketing, Music, Preparedness, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction, Survival, Writing stuff, YouTube | Tags: Alzheimer's, Amazon, art, ballistics, BBTI, blogging, book conservation, care-giving, Communion of Dreams, direct publishing, firearms, guns, health, hospice, jim downey, John Bourke, Kickstarter, Kindle, Legacy Bookbindery, literature, memoir, promotion, Science Fiction, St. Cybi's Well, stroke, The Beatles, video, writing
My wife answered the phone. I could tell just from her facial expression that it was bad news.
“Oh, no!” she said. “What happened?”
* * * * * * * *
As part of putting together the Kickstarter project for St. Cybi’s Well, I need to explain *why* I want people to hand over their hard-earned money. I mean, I don’t need to buy materials or hire someone to do research for me. I don’t need operating capital for renting a studio, there’s no up-front printing costs to speak of. Why not just write St. Cybi’s Well on my own time, at my own pace, the way I wrote Communion of Dreams and co-authored Her Final Year?
Writing such an explanation — writing anything, really — is the perfect way for me to clarify my thoughts, to push past vague thinking and distill my understanding. You’ll see the finished product in a few days, but this passage from a blog post a month ago is a pretty good insight:
I recently turned 54. And I have accomplished a number of things of which I am justly proud. I have friends and family I love. I have a wonderful wife. I have written books and articles which have brought joy, knowledge, and solace to others. I have helped to preserve history in the form of books & documents. I have created art, sold art, made my little corner of the world a slightly better place. I’ve even helped expand the pool of ballistics knowledge a bit. Frankly, I’ve lived longer and accomplished more than I ever really expected to.
But I have more yet to do. Time to get on with it.
* * * * * * *
My wife answered the phone. I could tell just from her facial expression that it was bad news.
“Oh, no!” she said. “What happened?”
She listened for a moment, then got up to go into her office. I heard her talking some more. When she came back I looked at her quizzically.
“Tanna had some kind of accident. John was calling to see if I had any ’emergency contact’ info from the Directory he could pass along to the hospital.”
A couple years ago, my wife and I put together this Directory for our neighborhood association. We’d included this option for people to list if they wanted. Tanna was one of our nearby neighbors, a nice semi-retired woman who we see almost daily on our walks.
I looked at her. “Anything?”
“Yeah, I told him what we had.”
“So, what happened?”
“She evidently had a stroke while out walking her dog. Just collapsed. John and a couple of other neighbors saw her go down, went to check on her, called an ambulance.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah.” My wife looked at me. “She’s only a couple years older than you are.”
Jim Downey
Filed under: Emergency, Health, Science, Science Fiction, Survival, tech | Tags: blogging, Communion of Dreams, emergency, health, hypoxemia, jim downey, liposomes, medicine, oxygen, research, science, Science Fiction, St. Cybi's Well, technology
There are a lot of ways we die. Massive trauma. Heart failure. Diseases of the organs which cause other body systems to shut down. But one of the more common mechanisms of death is lack of oxygen in the blood, what is called hypoxemia in the medical community. Without adequate oxygen in your blood, your brain and other organs start to die at the cellular level within minutes (in most conditions).
Hypoxemia can be caused by many different things, including a wide range of diseases and a variety of trauma. But if you can keep the blood oxygenated, you can buy time to treat the underlying cause. In the case of someone who has drowned, for example, this can be as simple as CPR. In other cases a heart-lung machine can keep someone alive while awaiting a transplant.
The problem is that sometimes it is impossible to buy that time. Maybe CPR isn’t viable. Maybe you’re too far from a hospital for other immediate treatments. Maybe it’d just take too long to get someone stable. In which case, this might work:
n a new study, published online today in ScienceTranslational Medicine, he and colleagues report the development of microparticles filled with oxygen gas that can be injected directly into the bloodstream. The particles quickly dissolve, releasing the gas and keeping organs, such as the brain, from suffocating.
* * *
The microparticles are tiny bubbles whose surfaces are membranes already used clinically to administer chemotherapy drugs and ultrasound dyes. But while those microparticles release their contents slowly, Kheir and his collaborators designed oxygen-containing particles that would dissolve as soon as they hit the bloodstream. They then tested the microparticles in rabbits breathing air low in oxygen. Within seconds of receiving the microbubbles, the levels of oxygen in the rabbits’ blood rose from a dangerously low 70% to nearly 100% saturation, the ideal level.
Promising. Very promising. From the abstract of the paper:
We have developed an injectable foam suspension containing self-assembling, lipid-based microparticles encapsulating a core of pure oxygen gas for intravenous injection. Prototype suspensions were manufactured to contain between 50 and 90 ml of oxygen gas per deciliter of suspension. Particle size was polydisperse, with a mean particle diameter between 2 and 4 μm. When mixed with human blood ex vivo, oxygen transfer from 70 volume % microparticles was complete within 4 s.
As noted, this is based on very proven technology: liposomes. These lipid-bilayer artificial “cells” are commonly used to deliver drugs in the bloodstream, and they are very well understood. This new application changes the liposome construction so that it dissolves much more quickly, allowing the oxygen to infuse the bloodstream almost instantly.
It is currently in animal trials. But based on how well the technology is understood, and the potential benefit it offers for a wide variety of life-saving applications, we could easily see this approved for human trials in the near term, and available for deployment within a few years.
And I just may need to find a way to work it into the next book…
Jim Downey
Filed under: Connections, Emergency, Failure, Flu, Government, Health, Pandemic, Plague, Predictions, Preparedness, Science, Society, Survival | Tags: antibiotics, blogging, flu, health, jim downey, obesity, pandemic, plague, predictions, probiotics, science
Your body has something on the order of 10 trillion individual cells. But surprisingly, it has nine or ten times that number of microorganisms which it hosts in some capacity or another, many of which we have co-evolved with and which seem to be critical to our long health. While these microorganisms are typically much smaller than human body cells, in one very real sense, “you” is actually only about 10% “you.”
These microorganisms have a substantial impact on how your body digests food. On whether you can resist various kinds of infection or develop any of a range of auto-immune diseases. Perhaps even on your mood and risk assessment.
Would it therefore be any kind of a surprise at all if doing something to change the “mix” of these microorganisms had an impact on you?
Hell, it’d be a surprise if it didn’t.
Almost all of us know what happens when you have to take a broad-spectrum antibiotic: usually some degree of diarrhea and intestinal discomfort. And in the last decade or two it has become commonplace for people to seek out some variety of probiotics, frequently in the form of live yogurt, as a way to replenish gut flora following antibiotic treatment. I do it myself.
So, extending that idea a bit, researchers are now investigating whether part of the slow-moving plague of obesity can be due to the changes created in the human-hosted microorganisms:
Early use of antibiotics linked to obesity, research finds
The use of antibiotics in young children might lead to a higher risk of obesity, and two new studies, one on mice and one on humans, conclude that changes of the intestinal bacteria caused by antibiotics could be responsible.
Taken together, the New York University researchers conclude that it might be necessary to broaden our concept of the causes of obesity and urge more caution in using antibiotics. Both studies focus on the early age, because that is when obesity begins, the scientists say.
As I’ve noted previously:
In Communion I have a post-pandemic society, one which is recovering from a massive disruption caused by a flu virus which caused rapid death in a large percentage of the population. But the reality of what we’re dealing with might be even more insidious.
More insidious in this case because we have done it to ourselves.
And perhaps not even with direct antibiotic treatment to deal with some kind of life-threatening infection. Consider that it is still a widespread practice to boost livestock weight gain through the use of antibiotics, and that leaves a residue of antibiotics in the meat. If it boosts weight gain in feed animals, why wouldn’t it do the same to us?
I’ve said before that there has been some kind of change to the way our bodies absorb nutrients in the last 40 or 50 years, and that that is behind the global rise in obesity. Previously there were indications that it might be due to some kind of virus. Or an immune response to the germaphobia of the 20th century. But maybe it is more directly our own damned fault, and we’ve traded the ability to defeat infections for a different kind of health risk.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Amazon, Architecture, Bipolar, Diane Rehm, Failure, Feedback, Health, Kindle, Marketing, Migraine, Predictions, Preparedness, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction, Survival, Writing stuff | Tags: Amazon, American Migraine Foundation, bipolar, blogging, Communion of Dreams, David Dodick, Diane Rehm, direct publishing, health, jim downey, Kickstarter, Kindle, literature, Mayo Clinic, migraine, NPR, promotion, Science Fiction, St. Cybi's Well, writing
I woke about 1:00 this morning, rolled over and looked at the clock. My side hurt, the way it usually does. But it was the nasty bit of headache which had the bulk of my semi-conscious attention. I reached over to the nightstand, picked up the pain pill I had left there. I sat up enough to pop it into my mouth, then picked up the water glass, took a drink to wash the pill down.
About 4:30 I repeated the task.
I still had the headache when I finally woke at about 6:00, just before the radio came on.
* * * * * * *
Our house is about 130 years old. It has a narrow central staircase off the kitchen which leads to the second floor, making three 90-degree turns in the process. As far as I know, these stairs are largely original, though there were some minor modifications made at the bottom back in the 1950s.
Between the first and second turns there’s an exposed nail where someone made a mistake in construction. It came through the riser, but didn’t enter the tread properly. Part of the wood popped loose, and at some point broke away. But it doesn’t really hurt anything, and is out of the way, so no one has ever bothered to fix it.
I notice things like this.
* * * * * * *
The energy dynamic has changed again.
Well, to be honest, it is always changing. But while I had been riding fairly high in my bipolar cycle, now I can feel the old doubts, the old fears starting to creep back in.
Doubts? Fears?
Of failure, of course.
As I contemplate putting together the Kickstarter for St. Cybi’s Well, I start to worry. Will it be successful? How the hell am I going to reach the audience for Communion of Dreams to let them know about it? For that matter — can I even write the damned book, and if I do, will everyone just hate the thing?
* * * * * * *
Yesterday the Diane Rehm Show had a segment about migraines. From the transcript, this is Dr. David Dodick, neurologist at the Mayo Clinic and chair of the American Migraine Foundation speaking:
Well, Diane, when one does a functional scan, like Dr. Richardson just talked about, whether it’s a PET or a functional MRI, we see activation of certain regions in the brain and certain networks in the brain, particularly those networks that process sensory information, like light and noise and pain and emotion. So we see activation of all of these networks during migraine. And indeed what we’ve come to recognize now is that not just during a migraine attack.
But even in between attacks the brain is processing all of that sensory information in an abnormally excitable way. So, migraine was thought to be just a disorder that comes and goes and you’re perfectly normal in between. But we now recognize the fact that it’s an abnormal processing — abnormal network processing in the brain that continues even between attacks.
* * *
And that’s one of the reasons why we, as a medical community, absolutely must take this to sort of more seriously. Migraine sufferers are three times more likely to have psychiatric disorder such as depression, anxiety, bipolar illness. They’re twice as likely to have epilepsy. They’re twice as likely to suffer an ischemic stroke. They’re six to 15 times more likely to develop brain lesions.
* * * * * * *
I woke about 1:00 this morning, rolled over and looked at the clock. My side hurt, the way it usually does. But it was the nasty bit of headache which had the bulk of my semi-conscious attention. I reached over to the nightstand, picked up the pain pill I had left there. I sat up enough to pop it into my mouth, then picked up the water glass, took a drink to wash the pill down.
About 4:30 I repeated the task.
I still had the headache when I finally woke at about 6:00, just before the radio came on.
I’ve had this headache off and on for the better part of a week. Maybe longer.
The codeine I take each evening/overnight to deal with the torn intercostal muscle pain is also effective at disrupting the development of a full migraine. But the cycle still tries to complete. It’s annoying.
But some things you learn to live with. Like imperfections in old homes. Yes, I’ll see the Kickstarter through, as well as writing the book whether or not the Kickstarter is completely successful.
Some things you learn to live with.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Connections, Emergency, Failure, Feedback, Flu, Flu Wiki, Guns, Health, Preparedness, Society, Survival, tech, Writing stuff | Tags: blogging, EDC, emergency, guns, health, jim downey, predictions, survival, technology
While I’m on a bit of vacation, I have decided to re-post some items from the first year of this blog (2007). This item first ran on December 29, 2007.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
As I have mentioned previously, I enjoy shooting. And I carry a concealed weapon (legally – by permit and where allowed by law) pretty much all the time. This isn’t paranoia, just a simple recognition that we live in an unpredictable and sometimes dangerous world. That same mindset applies to preparations for any kind of small-scale disaster, whether natural or man-made. If you live in the Midwest, you understand that power outages occur due to weather (tornadoes in Spring, Summer, and Fall, ice-storms in Winter), and that you may need to be self-reliant for days or even a couple of weeks. I’ve long abided by the Scout motto of “Be Prepared”, and while you wouldn’t find a years worth of supplies and a generator cached here, we could manage pretty easily for a period of a couple of months. That’s not too far off what is recommended by both the government and independent health agencies. As I’ve discussed, the onset of a pandemic flu may well cause a disruption of normal economic activity for a prolonged period, and I cite such a disaster as the background for Communion of Dreams.
Anyway, in an accident during one shooting trip this fall I managed to slice open my right thumb pretty well. I had ridden out to the family farm where I usually shoot with one of my buddies, so didn’t have my car, which contains a fairly complete first-aid kit. And, as it turned out, my buddy didn’t have any kind of first aid supplies in his car. We improvised a bandage from stuff in my gun cleaning kit, and things were OK. When I got home, I added a real first aid kit to my ‘range bag’, and didn’t think much more about it.
Then, a couple of weeks later I was back out at the farm with my BIL. We were walking the border of the property adjacent to a state park and marking it as private, since a lot of people don’t bother to keep track of where they are and we’ve had a lot of tresspassing. At one point down in a secluded valley my BIL and I paused for a breather, and just out of curiosity I checked to see if I had a signal for my cell phone. Nope. Hmm.
Now, it was nice weather, just a tad cool and damp when we set out. But it was November, and the leaves were slick in places where a fall could easily result in a twisted knee or a broken bone. I got to thinking – if I were on my own, what did I have with me that I could use in the event of an emergency? Oh, I had plenty of stuff in my car – but that was the better part of a mile away. What did I have on my person?
In truth, I was in better shape than most people would likely be in such a situation. I always have a Leatherman multi-tool on my belt, a small LED flashlight on my keychain, and a pistol and ammo. But still, since I don’t smoke I’m not in the habit of carrying matches or a lighter, I once again didn’t have any first-aid items, et cetera. I had stuck a small bottle of water in my jacket pocket, but that would hardly last long. I could probably cobble together some kind of splint or impromptu crutch, but it would be a challenge to get out of such a situation on my own.
When I got home I got to doing a bit of research about emergency survival kits. Google that, and you’ll come up with about 30,000 hits to sites offering everything from bomb shelters to equipment for first responders. Not particularly helpful. I decided to take a different tack, and started to think about what I wanted to have in a kit small enough that I would *always* have it with me. I set my goal for constructing a kit which would fit into an Altoids tin, since that is small enough to easily slip into any pocket.
This problem has been tackled by others, and there are actually some such small kits for sale that’ll run you upwards of $50. I looked over the commercially available kits, saw what others have done to solve the problems inherent in such a project, and came up with the following:
What you see there is:
- Surgical Mask (can also be used as a bandage)
- Fresnell lens for magnification or starting fires
- 20mm bubble compass
- Single-edged razor blade
- Suture pack (curved needle mounted with suture thread)
- Band-aids & steri-strips
- Antibiotic packet
- Emergency whistle
- Superglue (repairs, fabrication, wound sealant)
- Mini-lighter
- Cotton tinder tabs
- Water purification tablets (can also be used as antiseptic)
- 30′ of Spiderwire (15 lbs test)
- Safety pins
- Small ziplock bag for water
- Cash
- Painkillers
- Benadryl (anti-histamine, sedative)
- Anti-diarrheal tablets
Yes, it all fits in the Altoids tin. Just. It is not entirely satisfactory, as I would have liked to have a large piece (say 18″x24″) of heavy-duty aluminum foil, a couple of garbage bags, some lightweight steel wire, maybe some duct tape or heavier cord. But it is a pretty good start – any small kit like this is by necessity an exercise in trade-offs. (Edited to add 06/01/08: I wrapped about 15′ of 24ga steel wire around the mini-lighter in a single layer, tightly wrapped. Takes up almost no additional room, and will be easy to unwrap for use.)
In searching out the items I wanted (difficult to find items linked to my sources), it became clear that in some cases I would spend more on shipping for some of the components than I would for the actual items. So I made one such kit for myself, and another half dozen to give to friends. That got the cost down to under $10 each (not including the cash, obviously).
Your best survival tool in any situation is your brain. But it doesn’t hurt to have a few advantages in the form of useful items close at hand. With this small kit, and what I usually have with me anyway, I am reasonably well prepared to deal with most situations that I can envision. And I thought that since I went to the trouble to construct it, I would put the information about it here for anyone else who might have some use for it.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Babylon 5, Ballistics, Feedback, Guns, J. Michael Straczynski, JMS, Predictions, Preparedness, Science Fiction, Space, tech, Writing stuff | Tags: Alzheimer's, Babylon 5, blogging, direct publishing, health, hospice, J. Michael Straczynski, jim downey, literature, predictions, science, Science Fiction, space, technology, writing
While I’m on a bit of vacation, I have decided to re-post some items from the first year of this blog (2007). This item first ran on September 24, 2007.
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“All of life can be broken down into moments of transition or moments of revelation.”
-G’Kar, Z’ha’dum
Yesterday a buddy of mine and I got out to do some shooting. It may seem odd to someone who isn’t into shooting sports, but this can actually be one of the most relaxing things you can do, at least for me at this time. Why? Because, when I’m shooting, I have to be completely attentive to what I am doing – I can’t be thinking about what is going on at home, whether my MIL is stirring and needs attention, et cetera. As I have mentioned previously, one of the most exhausting aspects of being a care-giver for someone with Alzheimer’s/dementia is that I always, always, have part of my attention diverted to keeping track of what is going on with my MIL. You try doing that with part of your brain while accomplishing anything else, and you’ll quickly understand the problem.
Anyway, it was a good time, doing some informal shooting out on private land. We shot some pistols, a little 9mm carbine of mine which is just a lot of fun, and then my friend got out one of his black powder rifles: a Peabody .43 Spanish made in 1863. My friend is something of an authority on 19th century guns, and has been educating me about them. We shot several rounds, the large 400 grain bullets punching paper at 40 yards, the gun giving a slow but very solid shove back into your shoulder. That’s typical with black-powder: it’s not the sharp crack you get from modern weapons, with their higher pressures from faster-burning powder. After each shot, we’d pull down the trigger guard, rolling the receiver down and ejecting the cartridge, then insert another cartridge by hand and set it before closing the rolling block to prepare the weapon to fire again.
After all the shooting was done, our equipment packed up and put away, we headed back into town and got some lunch. As we talked over lunch, I asked my friend about how long it was before the Peabody we had been shooting evolved into the later repeating rifles which proved so reliable and popular. Because, as I saw it, all the elements were there: a dependable brass cartridge, a mechanism to extract and eject the spent shell, the moving receiver. All that was needed was a way to hold more rounds and feed them.
As we finished up our meal he gave me the brief run-down of the history or the repeating rifle development (which is basically what you’ll find in this Wikipedia article, particularly the sub-headings of ‘predecessors’ and ‘development’), and the conversation moved on to a more general discussion. I started to explain that one of the things I find so interesting, one of the unifying themes in all the things I have done is an interest in…
“Transitions,” my friend said.
I stopped. I was going to say “innovations,” but he was right.
“It shows in your novel.” (He’d recently read Communion.)
“Actually, I was thinking more of ‘innovations’ – those instances when people bring together different and diffuse elements to achieve something new, whether it is a mechanism, or a procedure, or just a way of looking at the world.”
We paid the bill, headed out to the car.
“Yeah, but it’s like the way that the people involved in your book – the characters – are all struggling to understand this new thing, this new artifact, this unexpected visitor. And I like the way that they don’t just figure it out instantly – the way each one of them tries to fit it into their own expectations about the world, and what it means. They struggle with it, they have to keep learning and investigating and working at it, before they finally come to an understanding.” He looked at me as we got back in the car. “Transitions.”
Transitions, indeed. Moments of transition, moments of revelation. Because that is all we have, when you come right down to it.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Amazon, Feedback, Health, Hospice, Kindle, Marketing, Promotion, Publishing, Society | Tags: Alzheimer's, Amazon, blogging, care-giving, direct publishing, free, health, hospice, jim downey, John Bourke, Kindle, memoir, promotion, reviews
Happy anniversary!
This is the one-year anniversary of when Her Final Year was first published. The culmination of years of writing & editing, and many more years of experience caring for Martha Sr and Georgia, interest has been building in this book since we first released it into the wild. The reviews (13 as I am writing this) have all been 5-star and very touching. Here’s an excerpt from one of the recent reviews:
A must-read for anyone dealing with a family member suffering from Alzheimer’s/dementia. Easy read, no holds barred memoir. Saw so much of my own mother, now in moderate-severe stage. Much good info and ideas. Suddenly I don’t feel so alone.
And today it is free to download. Yes – the Kindle edition of the book will be available all day for free to anyone who wants to get it. You don’t even need a Kindle to read it in this version – Amazon has a free Kindle emulator/app for virtually all computers, laptops, and mobile devices.
Do yourself and your family a favor. Download this book. Share it with others. Care-giving is something all of us will probably have to face, one way or another: this book helps.
Thanks.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 