HAPPY TO BE READ

 

Back to answering another from Karen Jones’s blog post list:

Are you excited about the idea of people reading your work…?

I have always had “people” reading my writing, whether they were my teachers or family members or friends. I know what Karen means, though. She means people I never met and likely never will-- except as readers.

 

My first published essay was in eighth grade. It was, as we used to say, a “heady experience.” Many years later, I began blogging. The few strangers who responded to my early posts quickly became on-line acquaintances.

 

But the first review I got to my published novel, The Voice of Thunder, brought people who were strangers to this day. This, like my eighth-grade essay, was “heady”. I imagine that multi-published writers who have wide readership have a more nonchalant feelings for the experience of complete strangers reading what they wrote. We humans adjust to most things that are not common and then become a new normal for us.

 

Few in the human family, which numbers in the many billions, become so-called famous. But for the famous (“celebrities,” how I dislike the word) it is just what is. Fame itself feels undesirable an existence to me. For the famous who don’t crash and burn, it is just the way it is.

 

So, the answer to the question is two-pronged: I find a reaction to my writing from a total stranger to quicken my heartbeats, but only for a bit, and then I adjust and it is how it is, part of the package of writing for publication.

 

Excitement is an ephemeral thing. It happens, and then it’s gone.

Have We Got an Offer for You!

Or—

Ha! Yet another scummy scam L

We all know by now that the IRS doesn’t call us on the phone asking us for supposed owed cash, pronto. We know a Nigerian Prince or a Ukrainian billionaire is not in need of our urgent help to release his gazillion $$$ into our account if only we provide our bank account number, or whatever.

But recently I encountered a brand new one that required more sophisticated search algorithm on the part of the scammers. A message was left on my home phone telling me it was so-and-so from a literary agency who was so impressed with my published novel (perfectly named ) and whose agency wanted to promote in an upcoming literary mega-fairs, (also properly named real events) and turn into an international bestseller. If interested, could I please call (number and name) for further discussion?

I can imagine what further discussion would amount to. Invariably it would require some sort of financial information from me.

This operation was rather funny. I wrote a very good book. But to think it a potential international bestseller is a stretch to the point of a tear. In addition, I’m traditionally published, not self-published. Everyone who is anything like a literary maven knows to approach the publisher, not call an author at his or her home. But what made it creepy is that my home phone is not listed anywhere under my name. If fact, none of my phones are under my name. So somewhere, the connectors of cyberspace have gone to deeper lengths to tie personal information together.

Hopefully, writers know that fee-charging agents are schmagents. By now we know that publishers who charge us are vanity presses. This is a minefield, which is not hard to avoid if we hold firm to the principal that we don’t pay. Rather, we are paid.

But there seems to be no end to the crooks' inventiveness. I want to tell them they should use their ingenuity toward the betterment of humanity instead. But I know any engagement is futile and will only lead my information to the sucker-list of those who reply in the first place.

Stay safe, everyone. Stay vigilant and remember to laugh occasionally, which is what I did at this last offer to make me the next J. K. Rowling.

Go VIRAL

How can you make your blog/tweets/Instagram/site/whatever catch on?

As one who has never had a post take over the Internet by storm, (or as they call it, go viral, which sounds ominously sickening) I can’t speak from experience. I’m an observer, just like you.

I find there are three kinds of posts that sometimes (but statistically rarely) catch massive attention.

The first are inspirational yes-we-can and never-give-up and the-best-is-yet-to-come sort of posts. When written with passion and conviction, (and especially from experience) they are needed and wanted and— let’s face it— like water on parched earth. I save, disseminate, and re-read these.

The second are the things-are-so-hard-right-now and I-could-use-your-support for-the-challenges-I’m/my friend/someone I know-is- facing and feeling-overwhelmed sorts of posts. If the story is told well and from a place that feels authentic, our empathetic nature just gravitates to disseminate these and try to enlist help.

The third sorts that catch attention are the mysterious, impossible to explain. At least I can’t. These are the nonsensical-peculiar and can-you-please watch-this-because-it-is-intriguing/amusing/or I don’t know what and what-the----?!?

Example of such is here.

The third kind of viral posts exemplify why no one can reliably plan an economy, or predict the future, or answer the ultimate matter of why we are here with complete accuracy.

And these third viral kinds of posts are the most interesting to me. Even though most are strangely inane, I continue to marvel at what our species will deem worth our while.

Magical Mystery Mouse

Long ago DD had a bosom friend that went with her everywhere. She called him Mousie.

 

Here they are, hand in hand, inseparable, in a photo almost a generation old. A friend’s mother embroidered a mouse on a T-shirt for her, and DD became known as the girl with the mouse.

 

 

There was the time in the supermarket when she set Mousie down  in order to help put a jar of peanut butter in the basket. Moments later, she realized she didn’t have him. It was pandemonium. Only when we found him again, resting patiently on top of another jar, was peace restored.

 

 

Then there was the time she had gone to sleep with him, as always, but must have let go in the middle of the night. Mousie was located behind her bed, and the promise of a good day was with us once again.

 

 

These separations became more frequent, but DD’s insistence that life can’t go on without Mousie did not abate. I worried that one day he would indeed leave us for greener pastures. I dreaded that day. Mousie was no longer a transitional object, as the clinical definition goes. He was a full-fledged member of the family.

 

 

One day, I found Mousie on the kitchen floor, all by his lonesome. I picked him up and almost returned him to DD, who was drawing with great concentration in the next room. Then I thought better of it, and put him away in a safe place where I can locate him if she asks for him.

 

 

She never did.

 

 

I forgot about him. Dust settled over many details of those times, and the colors faded as they do in old photos, both in albums and in my mind.

 

 

 

 Two years ago, DD and I were looking through an old box, when out fell Mousie.

 

DD gasped.

 

“Oh, my,”  I said. “Do you remember this?”

 

“Do I remember?” she said. “I thought about him and wondered where he was every day, for years!”

 

“You never asked...” I said.

 

“I didn’t want to upset you,” she said. “I thought I had lost him, and I didn’t want you to feel bad.”

 

 

I don’t know what lesson to take from this. I was thinking about it the other day, when I thought how often we don’t ask and don’t tell because we want to spare others. I wanted to tell DD, who still doesn’t share things when she wants to spare me, that she should have asked.

 

 

But the other side of it was that Mousie had to grow up, and he, as well as DD, had to move on.

 

My Life as a Torte*

*Inspired by Nora Ephron’s

MY Life as a Meatloaf

Re-reading Nora Ephron is a treat, no matter how many times I’ve read her before. She didn’t blog, per se, but she is called “the original Blogger” by some.

Turns out that a friend who opened a restaurant named a meatloaf dish after her. It bore no resemblance to any meatloaf she had made or eaten before, but it was fantalicious, and people complemented her on this gourmet version of a down-home lowly staple.

Then the chef changed, the dish changed, was moved to Tuesday nights only, and eventually disappeared from the menu. Ephron saw an analogy to her life, and life in general. You have your day, your heyday, your recognition, the fade out, and then you’re gone.

Four years after her death, Ephron still lives, and some meatloaf recipes carry her name and are still googled daily. But what didn’t quite apply to her life, turns out, does apply to mine.

I, too, had a dish named after me.

Long ago I managed the storefront of a gourmet pastry shop. The owner-chef was a genius, and while she insisted on never making a down-home cookie (no chocolate-chip) and never calling a cake a cake (she only made tortes, please!)  the cakes, ahmm, tortes, were as incredible tasting as they were gorgeous. Tasteful in and out.

She made some classics, but also came up with original concoctions. One of those she named the Mirka Torte.

It was not my favorite, but it was up there. Layers of Cake (torte!) speckled with shavings of dark chocolate and orange rind hugged an orange sabayon cream, a sort of fluffy custard, and a thin strip of cark chocolate ran in between. It was light, beautiful, and as it turned out, quite popular.

When I married she made our wedding cake, and of course it was The Mirka Torte. When my step-mother asked her why she named this composition after me, the answer was that it is both a simple and straight-forward, as well as a subtle and complicated composition. Just like its namesake.

“You really know Mirka well,” my step-mother said.

Two years after its debut, and long after we had worked together, I ran into this cake on a dessert menu at a fancy restaurant. It was still named Mirka Torte. No one knew why, but that was just fine.

And then it was gone. Like all ephemeral things, it had its day, and then it slipped into the night.

Which is as it should be, to make room for others.

But for a moment there I had a whiff of the Nora Ephron thing. It was nice.