RIP

My Macs are in deepest mourning this morning - rest in peace Steve Jobs - and thanks!

Minding my own business

Well, it's finally happened - I've become a meddling old busy-body. Who woulda thunk it? Here's the situation: on our street there are three elderly women living in horrible conditions in what I would characterize as a shack not fit for habitation. It has a warped slab of plywood for a roof and a window that was broken out last year and never replaced. (What they are going to do when the weather turns is anybody's guess.Freeze to death probably.) They have no garbage pick-up, burying their garbage in their yard when they are able. When they can't dig they leave the black garbage bags in piles all over their property. As you can imagine this has resulted in an impressive population of rats overrunning our neighborhood.

Thinking that these women had somehow fallen through the cracks in the system, I sent an email to the City of Burien outlining the problem.

Turns out I am the "problem". A gentleman from city hall called me yesterday. Since he didn't give me his name I'll call him Nameless Official. He told me that he was well aware of the women's plight. His points were:
1. People are entitled to live any way they want. (I thought the exception was if they were endangering themselves and others - apparently I was mistaken.)
2. Rats range for miles. Who knows where they are coming from? (Actually I don't care where they are from - the point I was making was that they ended up on our street drawn by the heaps of trash.)
3. The women don't want any help.
4. The problem will resolve itself as soon as the older woman dies since her two mentally disabled daughters are living on her Social Security check. Since they have no income of their own . . . (Not sure what his point was here.)

Gee, I sure got told. He didn't actually say "mind your own business, lady" but that was the gist. And here I always thought (to quote Dickens) "mankind was my business"! Whatever happened to the concept that communities must look out for the welfare of their most vulnerable citizens? I must have missed the memo that that concept had been repealed. It took Nameless Official to remind me to butt out. And to think that I pay taxes for him to do so. Live and learn. I hope he sleeps well tonight. That will make one of us.

Dead in the Water

Stalled out on the rewrite of "High Tide and Low Expectations" until I had a sudden inspiration! Came up with the perfect way to kick a case of writer's block. I'm calling it the S. O. S method (which stands for Sallie's One Star method). See, what you do is search amazon.com for your favorite author's most highly rated book - then read every one star review of that book - ONLY the one star reviews. Knowing that even the finest writer out there gets buckets of crappy reviews removes all the pressure to reach for an imagined state of excellence. The poet William Stafford once told me that when you get stuck on a poem the best way to move things ahead is to lower your standards. That was perhaps the wisest advice I've ever received. By letting yourself off the hook you open up a world of endless possibilities you otherwise would have rejected out of hand. Give it a try.

And yes, "High Tide and Low Expectations" is chugging along again at a healthy clip. Should have it finished by the end of this month.

This was the summer that never was. I borrowed a sunflower from years ago to bring color to this post. My present garden is a slumping disappointment draped with dew-spangled spider webs. It's given up. I'll be lucky to harvest a few green tomatoes. The cukes were stunted nubbins, the green beans made one meal, a single zucchini struggled into existence. (I gave it to our neighbor thinking surely there would be more appearing soon - nope.) Slim pickin's indeed.

This week I put away the deck furniture and cleaned up the front courtyard. There is little chance anyone will be sitting in the sun before next year. Of course we in the upper left hand corner should count our blessings - compared to the rest of the country the season was blissfully benign. No hurricanes, no triple-digit temperatures, no floods or fires. Basically, no nuthin'! And here we are, ready for winter. I'm hauling out the trappings of Samhain already and before I know it I'll be clipping strings of lights on the gutters to celebrate Yule. Happy New Year!

It's almost a year since our big family reunion. Already it has slipped into memory as a watershed year - the year Mom took her fall - the year I became a full-time caregiver. I have to look at it as a learning experience. The best we can do in life is roll with the punches - do the best we can with what we have. Though I know I'm pretty inept I just keep plugging away. Even the worst garden imaginable will sometimes produce a lone zucchini you can gift to a hungry neighbor.

When I announced I was publishing Red House Blues in e-book format people were asking me "how come?" - why an e-book? So I thought I'd take a minute to talk about my thoughts on the subject.

The other day I read an interview with one of my favorite mystery/thriller writers, Earl Emerson. (If you don't know his work, it's worth your time to check him out. He's utterly brilliant. He's also a Seattle author, and I'm all for supporting the locals!) In the interview he points to the radical change in the publishing industry in the last few years, what with the growth of print-on-demand and e-books - quite an understatement, I'd say. He wonders why writers continue to play the silly antiquated games foisted on us by the New York publishing industry. He's ready to bail and start publishing his books as e-books. He's not alone. (He also says nobody is reading anymore - a statement I don't agree with, but more on that later.)

It's a disillusionment I've been hearing quite a lot lately from traditionally published writers. Why on earth would anyone these days put up with the idiocy of submitting a manuscript to a couple of dozen publishers without getting so much as a howdy-do? Then - should a miracle occur and you get your novel accepted - you're looking at a lag time of a few years before your work actually sees print! That's outrageous. A friend of mine who has been publishing romance novels with some of the top houses in the industry for over 20 years can't get a reading anymore. Why? Because the purse strings are in permanent spasm back east. Publishers are terrified of committing the bucks unless they're guaranteed they have a bestseller on their hands. And even then there are no guarantees they'll sell enough to pay for printing, distribution and marketing - even if your novel is up to its jugular in vampires and teenage witches. That means if you aren't writing what has already sold, you aren't going to be selling a darn thing.

Now, Earl Emerson says he doesn't see people reading anymore. I do think that's true of print media. We can blame our lousy economy in part. When you have to choose between supper and an $8 paperback . . . well, it's a no-brainer you'll opt for a pizza (gluten-free of course). Which you will eat while reading a dollar version of the novel on your Kindle! (You don't even have to buy a Kindle device - just put Kindle on your laptop and you're good to go. Who knew?)

The sea change came to the music industry years ago. We can all remember the days when bands used to cut demos and pray they get signed by a record label. Now all they have to do is throw their work out there on the Internet and sell per download. Maybe we writers are a tad behind the curve but we're catching up. Check out smashwords.com and you'll see a boggling number of free or cheap-cheap-cheap books available for download. Clearly, people are still writing and they're reading - and saving trees while they are at it.

Technology is freeing our creativity, opening channels of expression unheard of a decade ago. No longer is writing and publishing reserved for the elite and favored few. We all have our stories and now that it's so easy to share them we have an obligation to do so. Fly, be free!

I'm still trudging through Camp NaNo-land trying to reach 30k on "Washed up on Barnacle Beach" - but I have managed to publish "Red House Blues" as an ebook on smashwords.com this morning. Really not as hard as I had imagined! I should do a few more. Here ya go with a link: Red House Blues

A KIND OF MADNESS

It's an addiction at this point, this novel writing thing. Wrote a novel last month in conjunction with Camp NaNoWriMo and figured that was all I needed to feed my habit - but no, now I've launched a second novel in as many months - this one called Washed up on Barnacle Beach. It's set in Westport, Washington (my home away from home) - my third novel set in Westport.Here's a link: CampNaNoWriMo

Wish me luck that two novels will be enough for me for a while. It wasn't too long ago I was stretching it to write a ten line poem. What a slippery slope!