Category Archives: Uncategorized

Weird lasts (my continued chronicle of a downsizing)

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Our house sale officially closes this coming Wednesday, which means the truck gets loaded Tuesday, which means this week I am experiencing the anticipatory wistfulness of moments that I’ll never have in this place again. For example…

The last lobster dinner Thursday night, and the last Pad Thai dinner Saturday night. My (now separated) husband traditionally cooks the lobster in this house, because I’m too much of a wuss. I’m glad he surprised me by taking advantage of the sale this week. (Best separated husband EVER!!!) I am the Pad Thai chef, inspired in this instance by the last half-bag of rice noodles and some chicken breasts I discovered in the chest freezer.

I can’t bring myself to kill lobsters with my own two hands, and I’m not sure how often I’ll bother with Pad Thai for just me and the kid who picks out all the shrimp and veggies, so there was definitely something a bit final-feeling about both meals.

The last spelunking dive into the chest freezer before cleaning it out for the new owners, who are buying it. If only those chicken breasts were the only thing I discovered. Clearly I’ve been making and storing far too much recaito for the last four years (recaito is a Puerto Rican mix of chopped peppers, onions, garlic, tomatoes and cilantro that I lovingly make from my own garden each year). Most of it was either too old or unlabeled, so it had to go into the trash.

No more chest freezers for me. I just don’t need that much food, especially if I’m not going to eat it for years because I can’t find it.

The last trash pick-up/the last dump day. This time of year, going almost a full week without it is a little scary. We have to pay for trash pick-up here, so it wouldn’t be cool to just leave it for the new owners. Fortunately, a neighbor has already volunteered to take some. Still, this means that any further de-cluttering has to be thrift-shop-worthy (and since I volunteer in one I know better than most that a lot of our crap isn’t), or it has to wait until after the move.

In the city, trash pick-up is included in my taxes. Yay.

It's called Furniture Inertia Syndrome.

It’s called Furniture Inertia Syndrome.

The last days sitting on this old sofa that we bought at IKEA when our 19-year-old was a toddler.

It’s comfortable as hell and has stood up better than anything else we’ve ever owned, but I can’t move it, let alone re-upholster it myself (though I did buy some fabric to try it — another uncompleted project). The last dump day was our last chance to get rid of it ourselves, but we had no truck yet.

Nobody wants this sofa bed, not even anyone on freecycle,org. Even the local charity I called said “Nobody wants that sofa bed.” They will discard it for a fee, though. Now I just have to pray that they really show up when they said they will. (They do want one of the beds.)

Since they’re coming at just about the last possible moment, we’ll have to leave room in the truck in case they don’t show. And then we may need to take an axe to the thing just so it’s possible to carry it.

(Note to self: Don’t pack the axe yet. Question for self: Why do you need an axe in the city? Answer to self: Doesn’t matter, because you can’t do anything about it now.)

Oh well. I think I’ll go enjoy some of the last central air conditioning.

Mother’s Day can be a pain

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In the United States, today was Mother’s Day.

It started for me with a kiss from my husband, who is back from his travels on a temporary basis before moving to Puerto Rico permanently. We’re officially legally separated now, but it’s amicable enough and he’s sticking around until the house is officially sold.

My nineteen-year-old son, of course, was sound asleep when I got up. (I got some dark chocolate from him later, yay.)

I went off to try something new — a communal session of Buddhist meditation at a friend’s house. When I got there she wished me a Happy Mother’s Day and I reciprocated before I remembered that she had no children. I corrected it to  “Happy Nurturing Others Day,” since she certainly does plenty of that. Still, I saw her face and I think I may have caused her some pain.

Sometimes I need to remind myself that my two main characters in The Awful Mess probably connected at least partly because they were both people who had felt left out as their peers married and had families. Mary’s husband had dumped her because they thought she was infertile. Winslow hadn’t landed a wife yet and wasn’t the kind to have a kid out of wedlock. (He wasn’t even the kind to have sex out of wedlock, when we first meet him.)

My husband and I had to resort to artificial insemination to get pregnant. He already had a daughter, and she was (and is) delightful, but she was already 13 when we married and she lived with her mother during the school year. I felt pretty bereft without a child of my own, so I’m very glad that we were eventually able to conceive Alejandro. We weren’t so lucky the second time we tried.

I bring this up because on days like this, it’s perhaps useful to be reminded that not every woman has had the good fortune to have a child. Other simply may not have ever wanted one. For those for whom this isn’t a voluntary situation, or just for those who are tired of the constant drumbeat of society’s expectations, Mother’s Day can be a painful holiday.

If this is a day that reminds you of frustrations or regrets you may better be able to keep at bay the rest of the year, I am so sorry.

It’s also worth remembering that mothering is something we can all do, and there’s no particular reason we must restrict it to our own flesh and blood. Tonight, I salute all of you who take the time to nurture any other person or creature.

My strapping young man

Me and my strapping young man, who doesn’t believe that he needs a haircut, thank you.

 

 

The mother of all spring cleanings

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This week we managed to get rid of a lot of stuff as we continued our preparations to list the house. I figured I’d continue sharing some of the nitty-gritty details of the process, including some projects that were not really worth the trouble. Maybe I’ll inspire some cleaning out there, or save you some wasted effort.

Clothing

Jaime set aside the clothes he needs to finish out his career and move to Puerto Rico, which left everything else for disposal. The picture below is just part of that sorting in progress. Five whole bags went to some funky organization that has clothing bins around the area. Presumably this group has figured out how to profitably recycle fairly crappy clothing, since bins always attract the worst stuff. I had to surmount a snow bank nearly as high as the bin to get to the opening; luckily, the snow had solidified into a pretty good climbing surface.

stuff that we successfully gave away

Some of the stuff that we successfully gave away — including that really ugly dresser in the background.

That left the remaining bags (and more when the dresser was emptied), plus some hanging clothes not in this picture, plus some boxes of miscellaneous household stuff. Two were just bags of cotton (AKA my husband’s old t-shirts) that the thrift store sells to mechanics by the bag. The rest, which I considered salable from my vast experience as a volunteer there myself, I parceled out to the thrift store a few at a time over a period of days. Doors of Hope is pretty small and can’t cope with too much at once.

Most of it went in with me during my regular shift Friday morning. As always, it’s fun to see some stuff I brought in get sold while I’m there, which means someone actually wanted it and was willing to pay a buck or two. (It’s also for an excellent cause — Doors of Hope uses proceeds from our thrift shop to fund the food pantry in the back of the shop.)

Furniture

A posting in freecycle.org managed to help us give away a fair amount of shelving and a small sofa and some other furniture I threw in at the last minute for the person who expressed interest, who turned out to be someone I knew. She brought us a dozen eggs from her chickens when she came for the second load. That was nice.

Freecycle.org is an organization devoted to keeping stuff out of landfills. You sign up online for your local county’s chapter. You have to start by giving something away, but after that you can also make requests. I’m still waiting to see if a guy who asked about the piano will follow through. That piano has me worried. Apparently quite a few end up in landfills these days.

One of my son’s friends who says he is hoarding furniture in preparation for his own apartment (and who actually likes to refinish it) took the horrible ugly chest that was in fine mechanical shape.

Gardening Stuff

An email to my local garden club helped me get rid of my fluorescent light set-up for seed-starting, pots and seed starting supplies, miscellaneous organic sprays, and a shelf, as well as some bulbs and plants. We made $50 by selling the water barrel and the shelf, so that was nice. I still have a nearly-new set of hydroponic Windowfarms I should probably get rid of, but if I land in the perfect house with the perfect window, I could set it up again and eat my own homegrown herbs and greens all winter. So… I’m still hoarding that.

Old Records and CDs

We tried selling two boxes of LPs at a used record store in Albany and made five bucks on the ten they accepted, which probably didn’t cover the cost of the gas required to get there and back. I could have had $10 in store credit instead, but I’m trying to NOT buy anything.

A colleague who teaches Spanish has already taken a bunch of Spanish-language books she can share with her students, and now will be taking some the remaining Spanish LPs, too. Fortunately one of my brothers volunteered for anything that remains. (Unfortunately, I won’t be seeing him before the house goes on the market.)

The CD pile is huge at the moment, especially since Jaime decided he shouldn’t take any to Puerto Rico after all. Some will go to Doors of Hope or the library, but since they don’t take up much room I’ve postponed making a lot of decisions there until I can listen to them. I also have scores of CDs of my dad’s fake radio shows. I know there are a few I want to listen to again in there, so … that’s another box to store, at least for now. I did dump all the old ones from the cassette days, at least.

Books

I already gave most of those in salable condition to the local library. (That means they are in good condition, with clean spines, and are not textbooks or condensed books or out of date or bestsellers that everyone already has — i.e. just about anything by Stephen King, John Grisham, Nora Roberts, or Mary Higgins Clark). The librarians pick through them for books they can use to replace worn shelf copies or to augment their collection. They then either sell the rest, or ship them off to an organization that sometimes makes a little money back for the library.

Old paperbacks with creased spines or yellowed pages won’t sell and should be recycled with regular paper. Spiral bound books and notebooks have to be taken apart first because only paper can go in the bin. Since local map books have been made obsolete by smart phones, this week I tore apart quite a few for the recycling bin, remembering how my husband and I used to spar over possession of them and wondering what the employees of map publishers were doing for a living these days.

Thankfully I never ordered a big supply of my own book, which sells much better as an e-book than a paperback. I have four paper copies to dispose of, two of which I need to donate to my college’s library (one copy to sit entombed in the collection of other stuff written by college employees; I’m hopeful they’ll accept the other to actually circulate). That leaves two so far unclaimed, so if you want to purchase a signed copy of The Awful Mess, now’s the time to ask. (Just remind me to actually sign it for you, since I sometimes forget!)

Miscellaneous metal

We filled Jaime’s car with our metal junk, including an entire heaping box of old cables and wires. Also included: old pots and pans, a dead toaster oven and garbage disposal, really old license plates, miscellaneous nails and screws, dead fluorescent light fixtures, metal pieces from a defunct office chair, orphaned grills and other stove parts, broken garden lights, old cookie tins I had hoarded in case I ever needed something to put something in,  and so on. Half of what we made was from the copper, bronze, and aluminum I managed to separate out. It all earned us about $40 and saved us dumping fees, so I’ll consider that a win.

Just plain trash

This is just stuff that had to go to the dump. This is the first year I’ve had a permit, since we pay for regular trash disposal and usually stay well within our limit, but that just won’t do the trick at this point. The town’s bin for paper recycling has been a godsend, but we’re also more than halfway through our supply of 10 large approved dumping bags at $4.00 a bag. The town also accepts TVs and computers and other electronics from residents for free, to prevent them from ending up in landfills. This is great, and has allowed us to dump a whole bunch of old stuff. We’ve also been able to get rid of paint cans (full or empty) for free.

And we’re not done yet

So what’s left? Some furniture, some rugs, and still way too much paper that still needs to be sorted and shredded. Also left: fluorescent bulbs, used and unused. The guy at our dump told me New York homeowners can legally dump bulbs from residential use instead of paying $2 each to dispose of them properly, but I’m feeling a little torn about that. (These bulbs contain minor amounts of mercury, a toxin.) I’m also wondering just how differently the town disposes of them if I do pay the $2.

I should probably rent a storage compartment off site for some of this stuff that’s left, but it’s down to a small enough pile that we might be able to just use a corner of the basement for it. Speaking as someone who is beginning to scan the internet for houses on sale, I think it might be reassuring for folks to see clear evidence that someone trusts their basement enough to leave furniture and framed art right on the floor.

Notice that I haven’t mentioned our son’s room yet. Alejandro is not happy about moving and is being about as passive-aggressive about it as a person who’s usually pretty nice can be. This pushes every button I have, so that’s been fun. I try to remember that at his age I’d become a pack rat myself. Not until I lived out of a backpack and a suitcase for my junior year in England did I realize that I didn’t need a whole lot of familiar stuff around me  – that it might even be rather freeing to give it all up.

Judging from what we’ve already packed of his and what remains, though, he won’t be learning that lesson himself anytime soon.

Cleaning

This week I had a woman our real estate agent recommended come in to help with the cleaning. She gets $20 an hour, which helpfully clarifies exactly how much money I’m losing if I do other stuff instead of that. She showed me that most of our windows tip in for cleaning, something I’ve conveniently failed to notice for the last 11 years — despite the handy diagram that (she pointed out) is sitting at the top of every window.

She also got the downstairs shower door clean. This I take as a kind of miracle since I didn’t manage that even when I used oven cleaner on it (yes, oven cleaner). If you want to try her technique, she used Barkeeper’s Friend and a plastic scrubby, and followed it up with a regular window cleaner. I’m writing it here at least partly so I can find it again when I need it!

She didn’t get the kitchen cabinets much cleaner than I’ve managed myself, so she says she’ll try getting something a little more powerful. I fear it may take mineral oil to really do the job. I tried a magic eraser on one of the greasy spots around the door handles and will now need to polish it with paste wax to get the shine back. Do not use magic erasers on a fine wood finish!

The carpets are supposed to get cleaned Thursday. I had to explain to my son that this was why he couldn’t leave a pile of stuff I wasn’t supposed to look at under his bed.

Then, after I sneak off for a short visit with a friend where I do not plan to clean or organize ANYTHING, it’s listing time.

Here’s hoping that you won’t have to hear me whining about keeping a house tidy while it’s being shown. Maybe it will sell ON THE VERY FIRST DAY, or perhaps after an intense three-day bidding war in which we get to choose the passionate gardener who can’t wait to have me come back and divide plants with her. (This is also the one who won’t say a single unkind word about the shower doors, and would like nothing better than to keep the piano right where it is.)

Hey, a seller can dream!

P.S. Re some spelling up above: I think the American spelling of “salable” is strange. It looks too much like someone meant to say “syllable” but got a bug in his mouth. The UK has it right with “saleable.” But I’m an American, and not one who writes dictionaries, so I’m reluctantly bowing to my countrymen and their (weird-ass) spelling on this one.

Mulling results from a Kindle Countdown Deal

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One of the principles I follow as an independent publisher is that just about anything is worth trying.

When I first published, I discovered that offering The Awful Mess: A Love Story free through Kindle Select could pay off quite nicely in reviews and in residual sales that at least paid my advertising costs, although it was clearly not the magic bullet that it might once have been for indie publishers.

This time I tried the new Kindle Countdown Deal, supported with notices at affordable Awesome Romance Novels, free eReader Cafe, and (most expensively) at BookGorilla, as well as a notice at eBookSoda, which was thankfully free since I screwed that one up. (Turns out you have to do a separate Kindle Countdown Deal in the UK, and I didn’t realize that. And since eBookSoda is based in the UK, they went with my non-sale pricing.)

I would most certainly have used BookBub if I could have, but it wasn’t available to me (titles can only be there once every six months). I suspect my ranking would have been higher with it. Then again, it stayed so consistent throughout the promotion that it might be that I simply hit my title’s natural “level” and stayed there as long as Amazon’s promotion was in effect.

But even the first day, at 99 cents and with limited exposure, my book shot up in sales. It ranged between 1,800 to 2,500 in the Kindle store, which kept me on the first page of the bestseller lists for literary humor, literary romance, and women’s fiction humor.

This goes to show the importance of having useful key words, by the way. If you look at the shot on the right, you see that my book got highlighted as a hot new release in literature and fiction>humor and satire>humor — which helped drive further sales, I’m sure. (Mind you, the fact that I’m a “hot new release” was probably accidentally abetted by my new cover, which I didn’t realize would give this edition a new release date.) If my only key word had been romance (and no literary), I might not have shown up anywhere.

080078Changing a couple of keywords at mid-course didn’t seem to have any impact, though. (I switched from “divorce” to “dating and relationships” and from “New Hampshire” to “United States.”)

It’s also interesting to me that the “Love Story” in my subtitle no longer generates inclusion in searches for love stories. Perhaps Amazon got tired of all the keywords showing up in  titles and subtitles and has changed its algorithms to avoid rewarding that.

I had planned to do more, but the week with my parents in Florida had not allowed as much engagement with anything online as I’d hoped, and then I came down with a miserable cold, or perhaps the flu-shot version of the flu, and ended up barely functioning  for most of my countdown week.

A more prepared person certainly would have dovetailed more promotions into the middle and end of this deal to keep sales coasting along longer. They dropped off very fast at the conclusion of the deal; I’m seeing minimal residual sales now.

But I really can’t complain. It worked well while it was working. Amazon provides a pretty neat report on this strategy, too. Their useful report tells me I sold over 500 copies in my sale week, up from only a few the week before. (Beyond that, I also had a number of borrows.)

Although the book sales rate was about even, the income was much higher at the end for the 71 hours I was at $1.99, versus the earlier 96 hours at 99 cents. And I didn’t promote the second tier with any external marketing, so I have to assume that was primarily due to Amazon’s own Kindle Countdown Deal promoting, though I suppose my occasional tweets and kindly retweets from GreatBooksGreatDeals and Awesome Romance Novels (as well as fellow authors) might have helped.

Would it have worked as well if I’d gone out with $1.99 as my first sale price? I doubt it, but it’s impossible to know without testing.

It could be that the recent book giveaway I ran on Goodreads helped in some way, too, though I can’t say it helped to any great degree with book sales in its immediate aftermath. I did revise my giveaway ad there to support the Countdown Deal and got a few clicks. (Apparently the lifetime .05% click-through rate on my ads over there is considered good, but I can’t say I see that as driving any particular trend.)

One temptation from all this is to assume that dropping the price to $1.99 would make sense. Amazon of course prevents this by not allowing anyone to drop the price for 14 days after a Countdown Deal. But I’m also doubtful that it would help a lot. First of all, I’d be earning at a lower royalty rate (and maintaining your regular royalty rate is part of what makes Countdown Deals appealing). Second, I’ve tried lower pricing and haven’t really seen much pop from it. In fact, 99-cent pricing actually seemed to depress sales. Then again, I seem to do best in the humor and literary fiction categories, where price may signal something it doesn’t in, say, the romance category.

It might be worth trying $2.99, though.

I had been planning to leave Kindle Select at the end of my current enrollment period so I could get out to the other sites. Now I’m not so sure. I don’t expect to have my next title ready until summer, and I suspect that another round of a Countdown Deal, this time supported by BookBub, would be worth trying.

Other questions I’m currently mulling:

  • Should I enter the book in the Amazon Breakthrough Awards? It feels a little ass-backwards when I’ve already sold 1200 copies or so (not to mention given away 50,000). I particularly question this since the wording of the contest rules suggests I should enter the PG13 version rather than the one with the two sex scenes in it.
  • Should I just drop that PG13 edition? People looking for my book by my name or the book title often end up there, for some reason. It’s confusing, and confusion is not your friend when you’re trying to sell something. On the other hand, I’m also worried about what happens to the book purchased by the rare souls who have purchased the PG13 edition. Will it disappear from their Kindles?
  • What’s the best next move? Come out with an anthology of short stories I’m willing to sell super cheap (Missionary Dating and Other Not Terribly Literary Stories), or come out with the next novel? Or should I try another round with literary agents, now that I’ve established a little credibility out in the marketplace?

Who the heck knows? Meanwhile, I’m also busy trying to sell this house. So … life is full.

Feel free to offer your advice, and share any thoughts or experiences you might have had with Kindle Countdown Deals.

How Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings found her groove

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Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, failed romance writer?

One of the most pleasant days of my recent week-long visit with my parents in Florida (I’m from the Tampa Bay area originally), was a visit to the old farm house and orange grove where Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings wrote her classics The Yearling, Cross Creek, and more.

According to the excellent guide who took us through the house, Rawling and her husband, both would-be novelists, had decided to ditch their dead-end newspaper jobs up north and try their hand at oranges and fiction.

Their timing was terrible. They had a mortgage, and shortly after their arrival the Great Depression hit and devalued their investment immediately (and apparently also killed the market for romance novels — which I find hard to believe from today’s perspective).

Our guide suggested that Mr. Rawlings couldn’t stand the competition with his more talented wife and cleared out, leaving her stranded on a farm in the middle of the Florida scrub.

Rawlings set out to learn how to survive from her neighbors, and wrote a short piece about them that got her noticed by an editor up north. He pushed her to do more in that direction, and the eventual result was The Yearling, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1939.

When I was moved from Tampa’s Dunbar Sixth Grade Center to Clearwater’s Palmetto Elementary in the sixth grade, Mrs. Ellis was reading The Yearling aloud to my raptly attentive home room, which may be part of the reason I didn’t read it again until just last year.

When I finally took it up on my own I initially found it a bit stylistically flat, with a repetitive rhythm of simple declarative sentences — ideal for a children’s book, perhaps — but then I quickly got wrapped up in the tale of a small, emotionally fraught family trying to survive by their wits in the middle of the Florida wilderness. As a gardener and a cook, I was particularly fascinated by their plantings and preservation techniques (from today’s perspective it’s hard to believe they survived eating meat potted in fat and stored under the house without refrigeration).

I can understand how Rawlings and Zora Neale Hurston became friends despite the formidable racial barriers of that era, because they clearly shared a similar interest in anthropology and a similar appetite for adventure. (Their Eyes Were Watching God is another novel of Florida that captures a way of life that has since disappeared.)

Both Rawlings and Hurston brought keen outsider’s eyes to their subject, which makes me wonder how often writers are born from — or at least shaped by — that essential injury of being transplanted to a strange new world.

This is certainly the case with me — so far I have always written about the Northeast, after having been moved there (kicking and screaming) at the age of sixteen. I suppose if I ever move back, I might be able to bring the same observer’s eye to my home state, but I am not in any hurry to do so. (Sorry, Mom and Dad.)

Anyway, it was interesting to see how a change of venue — and an open mind towards her new environs — led to astonishing success for Rawlings, especially when The Yearling was made into a popular movie. (Whoever designed that movie poster had clearly never been to Florida, which has no mountains.)

It was also interesting to hear that Rawlings’ pronounced her maiden name KinAWN. That was news to me.

We had to leave our tour without exploring the grounds because we were meeting friends of my parents at the nearby The Yearling Restaurant. It was a fitting end to the adventure, for we shared fried gator, frog legs, and green tomatoes as an appetizer, while Willie Green played blues in the background.

(For the record: Yes, gator tastes like chicken — chicken with the texture of lawn chair mesh. Frog legs also taste like chicken, but the texture is much better. Seems like quite a waste of frog, though.)

If you can’t make it there yourself, I hope you’ll enjoy this tour of the house:

“Kindle Countdown Deal” today through the 21st

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We’re trying this one out, without much expectation, because I just haven’t had time to set up the associated marketing required to make anything work.

Update: Apparently we did enough after all, since it’s doing pretty well. Yay. Knock wood…

The e-book may never be cheaper than it is through Saturday, though, so tell your friends: The Awful Mess: A Love Story is only 99 cents (and 77 pence or so) (not sure why, but the Kindle Countdown Deal pricing is not hitting the UK) right now.

Sunday through Tuesday it will be $1.99. After that it’s back to its regular $3.99.

NOTE: I believe this special pricing only works in the US and UK.

 

 

Merry Christmas or happy holidays?

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It’s hard to believe that how we wish people well at this time of year has become a political litmus test.

Look, if you’re one of those people who is defending the right of that dude on Duck Dynasty to say whatever he wants, no matter how hateful or clueless it is, then I hope you also refrain from condemning people for saying something as benign as “Happy Holidays.”

Because you just can’t do both. Not without being either incredibly unaware, a complete hypocrite, or a devoted bully.

For one thing, “happy holidays” just makes sense, because there’s the New Year in the same season. “Happy holidays” is usefully plural.

Then there’s the reality that not everybody celebrates Christmas, and freedom of religion is another one of those grand American traditions worth being patriotic about (not that anybody in this country can really escape the overwhelming commercial presence of Christmas pretty much from Halloween on).

One of my Muslim students wished me a “happy holiday” as she said goodbye on the last day of class and I asked her if there were any Muslim holidays during the break. “No, just ordinary days for us,” she said, with a smile. I can’t help thinking that some of my otherwise quite lovely friends who get churlish about this would chill if they could simply meet people like this student in their daily lives.

Observant Jews don’t celebrate Christmas. Others sometimes do, much as  atheists and agnostics do. This latter group includes my parents, who indulged us with Santa Claus and a tree, but no religious content.

Other folks – Pagans and Wiccans, especially — celebrate the winter solstice instead, which Christians borrowed for their own uses a long time ago.

Jehovah’s Witnesses, who are Christians, don’t celebrate Christmas in the traditional sense. I wondered if the kids would feel deprived, but in-laws of mine had a tradition of going out on Black Friday and getting presents when they were cheap. The kids then got to play with everything right away, and no wrapping was required. They didn’t seem too unhappy with that deal.

Greek and Russian Orthodox Christians often celebrate Christmas according to a different calendar, usually Jan. 7.

Until recent generations, my husband tells me, Puerto Ricans’ largest celebration was originally El Dia de los tres reyes magos, or Three Kings Day, which falls on the twelfth day of Christmas, or January 6, known to Episcopalians like me as Epiphany. On the eve of that, children leave a box filled with grass for the wise men’s camels under the bed and wake to presents left there in its place.

Since my husband is Puerto Rican, my son grew up with a little bit of that tradition, although in our house (and on the island, too, these days) Three Kings Day is not a bigger deal than Christmas. It usually falls on an ordinary school day, so it’s not exactly easy to make a big production out of it. And getting our hands on grass this time of year isn’t very easy, either. Those poor camels usually have to make do with Christmas tree trimmings from us.

We never actually hewed to the Santa Claus tradition in our home, though it was inescapable in the culture. Frankly, I’m uncomfortable lying to my kid even about Santa Claus, though I didn’t go out of my way to demolish any belief that he might develop, either – and, in fact, at one point after he figured it out, he actually requested that we pretend Santa was real because that was way more fun.

Generally, however, we followed my husband’s custom and labeled my son’s presents as coming from the baby Jesus (on Christmas) or the Three Kings (on Three Kings Day) rather than from Santa Claus.  We do have the tree, though, and it’s always real. Alejandro and I love the smell, and I’m making up for all those years of putting the fake tree together down in Florida. We also live in Christmas tree farm country, so it’s another way of supporting local farmers.

So I’ll wish you a happy…  whatever it is you celebrate.

Personally, I’m going to celebrate the holidays and my semester break by taking a break from this blog and trying to catch up on other things, including lots and lots of reading, and a long visit with the folks. I’ll pop in here and there with tidbits, but there will be no long posts here until February.

What are your family’s unique holiday traditions? Feel free to share.

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The fine art of twitter stalking

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When I first tried Twitter — because it was one of those things all authors were supposed to do — I was instantly addicted. I enjoyed getting little tidbits of this and that. At first I was only following a few of my favorite bloggers and comedians and magazines and such, and it was easy to keep up. But as I followed more people and organizations, I began to realize:

  1. I have no hope of keeping up with this.
  2. This takes a lot of time.
  3. This isn’t selling any books.

So I started ignoring it for days at a time. But at some point I dipped back in and came across a post from Joel Friedlander – a man wise in the ways of indie publishing and generous about sharing his wisdom – in which he suggested that authors should build their Twitter networks not by following other authors, but by following people who describe themselves as avid readers.

And that works. A bit. Mind you, it’s laborious. I think of it as hand-selling. I’m doing well with it if one out of every twenty or thirty people I follow gets curious enough to check me out, and then also gets curious enough to buy or borrow my book — but that’s something. It’s enough to keep The Awful Mess: A Love Story from sinking into an utter abyss in the absence of any other marketing efforts.

Probably even more valuable than the sales, I’m building a list of fairly targeted followers. Although not very many people I follow immediately buy my book, a fair number of people do follow me back. Which means I can still talk to them. So there’s some potential there over the long term.

Of course, this strategy only works up to 2,000 or so follows, at which point Twitter decides you’re creepy or something and shuts you off.

When this figure neared for me, I signed up for an account at justunfollow.com. I’m personally not a fan of people’s daily tweets of how many followers and unfollowers they have, so I opted out of that, but I do occasionally tweet my own variation of their suggested tweets. It’s only fair to give this valuable free service some shout-outs now and then. (It’s not the only one available, either, so feel free to look around.)

Anyway, with this one, everyone gets 25 free unfollows a day. The occasional tweet on their behalf entitles you to fifty unfollows a day. And your non-followers are neatly organized with the oldest ones first.

So I go through that list and I clear out most people who haven’t followed me back, unless they happen to be particularly interesting.

I also tend to pretty quickly unfollow people who send me chirpy direct messages without following me back. I don’t mind being hit up with a marketing message, but a direct message suggests a willingness to interact, and I can’t DM back people who haven’t followed me. So that just seems rude. (First I’ll usually wait a week or so to see if they’ve just forgotten to pay any attention to their account.)

I do the same for most of the hapless folks who auto-DM me back to tell me they use TrueTwit validation. (DON’T use TrueTwit validation.)

And I will probably always follow more people than follow me, barring sudden fame (and I’m not holding my breath on that one). I find a lot of people interesting, and as I said before, I enjoy getting these little morsels of information.

Anyway, now that I’ve unfollowed enough to clear up space for more follows, I stalk writers whose work seems enough like mine that their readers might like my stuff, and I follow their followers — if they talk about being readers.

This isn’t all that easy, because most of the authors I idolize don’t have Twitter accounts, and Jane Austen, for example, has been dead way too long to be tweeting anybody, although she is associated with a surprising number of Twitter accounts. So I hunt for readers of women’s fiction and “smart chick lit,” or just about any Episcopalian who will admit to reading. Also, if anyone mentions being a Kindle addict, I’m on them like fat on bacon.

Of course, I’m late to this game, clearly, because other indie authors are in fact the majority of the followers of most published authors. I ignore them unless they speak of avid or voracious reading themselves or just seem to be an unusually kindred spirit. I usually ignore librarians and booksellers, too, because neither will have easy access to my book right now and will probably sniff at me in disdain. I also ignore people with locked accounts, people who haven’t tweeted in weeks, people whose politics and religious attitudes suggest they’d happily consign me to hell, and people who do nothing but tweet contests and marketing messages.

Along the way I’ve noticed that dark chocolate and red wine merit A LOT of mentions in women’s profiles. It’s actually quite fascinating to see how people from all over the world sum themselves up. (I’m stunned that I haven’t yet come across a single mention of long walks on the beach. It’s not really a hook-up oriented medium, apparently, or maybe I’m just looking at the wrong demographic for that.)

My next stage with Twitter will be organizing the people I follow into lists. I had no idea what that was until recently, and it makes so much sense. You can put the people you follow into categories, public or private, and then focus on that category only when you’re interested in it. Sounds like a good January project.

Do you have any Twitter tips, techniques, or pet peeves that you’d like to share?

Twitter Screenshot 2013-12-16 11.02.37

Pride goeth before a fall (or at least a misspelling)

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One of the risks of calling this enterprise SHEER HUBRIS PRESS is that there’s a little extra irony — a wonderful soupçon of inevitability, really — when I screw up.

Only on this last revision of The Awful Mess: A Love Story did Amazon’s converter notify me of a spelling error I didn’t even realize was a spelling error. And I’m an English teacher and a former editor! (No, I won’t tell you what it is. You get extra points if you can find it, but it’s already gone in the Kindle store.) Alas, it was NOT caught before I’d ordered my book proofs. That’s expensive and time-consuming, because it means another round of proofs.

Most of the stuff I caught this time around was minor. There were words not italicized when I wanted them to be, and some inconsistent use of italics in general (I won’t pretend to have fixed that). There was a scene in which my heroine managed to fit “showers” into a space of time that would only allow one. There was a comma outside single quote marks. (The horror!)

Then there was my p013anic attack about apparently skipping an entire chapter in my chapter numbering. Thankfully, the guy working on the book told me my numbering was fine, since I later found the missing chapter under the desk, where it had hidden after Bo knocked over my neat stack of pages. (He’s not a great office assistant.)

I also developed some concerns about my use or non-use of the subjunctive tense. But this one’s a little tougher, because there’s an argument to be made that English is gradually losing this tense. I’m not saying that’s a good thing, but it’s something I have observed in common practice. And that’s how English always evolves — in common practice.

This section reserved for grammar nerds

Generally speaking, if you construct a conditional sentence about something that is not true, the subjunctive tense (or mood) is required. In other words, if Arthur says “It would be much worse if I was taking this kind of interest in you and you were in my church,” I’m pretty sure he is being ungrammatical.

I believe that “was” should be a “were” because Mary is not, in fact, in his church. Though since he is interested in her in fact and it’s in a compound sentence, I suppose we could debate the matter — after all, the second part could be subjunctive rather than just straight past tense, and English isn’t mathematics with handy parentheses to help us figure out in which order to solve the equation. That’s why I didn’t do it the first time. But being consistent with tense within a sentence is a good thing. So I edited that one this time around.

I did this since Arthur is clearly well-educated, so he should probably use the subjunctive instinctively. However, people speaking are not always as grammatical as they are on paper. So … I don’t know. Honestly, I think I could have gotten away with it. (Feel free to weigh in.)

Later, I’m quite certain I could have gotten away with it if Annie had said, “Maybe if he was about twenty years younger and not so damned religious.” Annie has already confessed that she hates writing and can’t spell. She probably wouldn’t know the subjunctive tense if it came up to her in a bar and bit her on the butt. However, in my book she actually says “…were about twenty years younger.” That’s because I used it unconsciously. Should I have? Probably not. But I left it as it was.

The reality is that 99% of readers won’t notice a missing subjunctive tense and 50% of the remaining 1% won’t care even if they do.

The challenge of regional colloquialisms

At another point I wimped out on something I had done intentionally wrong in the book, and had always meant to include somehow because it was something I so enjoyed hearing when I lived there. Many New Hampshire residents routinely employ the double negative. For example, you might hear:

“I need to make a trip to Keene.”

“So don’t I!”

I wanted Winslow to sound at least a little local and at one point I had him saying, “So hasn’t everybody.” But then I just couldn’t stick to it. People who were not familiar with the local grammar would think I’d made a mistake. Maybe if I’d found a way to get Bert to say something like that, I could have stuck to it. Maybe if I’d added something like, “lapsing into the local dialect, Winslow said, ‘So hasn’t everybody’.”  But that would have taken people out of the flow of the narrative. So he just says, “So has everybody.”

Sometimes it might make sense to do things wrong on purpose. For example, every once in a while I have found that there is really no good way to avoid an instance of poor agreement like “Your child never knows when they might be called upon to perform” without resorting to an awkward “he or she, ” which is one of the clunkiest constructions in the English language, and one that very few people use it in common speech. In my days in educational publishing we used to take pains to alternate between the he and she, always choosing the less gender-stereotypical gender. (“Your child may wish to become an engineer. So she needs to…”) Usually I try to find a way to avoid the problem, but in advertising we’ve sometimes just knowingly committed the error instead.

Other times, I’m the stickler. I can remember an unexpectedly bitter debate once with another writer who declared that semi-colons should never be used in dialogue. I disagreed. If we’re going to punctuate based on what people are actually thinking as they speak, there’s not much call for any punctuation. But people are reading our dialogue, not listening to it. Even in a script, actors have to read that dialogue and make sense of it. Punctuation is simply there to help our words make sense. Semi-colons are a useful part of the arsenal of sense-making. Of course, I also know from my students that there an awful lot of people who have no idea when they should be fired.

English is always flowing and changing. Consider the news that “selfie” has been added to the Oxford Dictionaries. Or just watch your local evening news, or commercials. Certainly our local stations appear to have decided that copy editors are a luxury they can’t afford anymore. Brian Williams also seems to delight in constructions like “What about them Red Sox,” though I hope that’s just his idea of sounding cool.

I wasn’t trying to be cool with my errors, and I have no excuse other than trying to do all this stuff myself. Someday, I hope to make enough money at this to be able to hire the most tight-assed proofreader in the universe to check my work. In the meantime, I make do with what I have at hand: me, the friends who read my early drafts, and a few sharp-eyed readers who are willing to share.

Do feel free to help me out with that by catching my errors.By the laws of irony, there should be at least one or two in this very blog post.

Book updates

This week my book has a wonderful new cover — if it ever shows up. Amazon is taking a very long time to update it. It appears that they require actual humans to look at new covers before they publish them now, which is probably smart given that it has a (tastefully) naked person on the cover.

For those of you who are waiting on the paperback, I’m sorry. Thanks to that spelling error, I now have to do another round of proofs, which also requires waiting for book proofs to arrive in the mail. Hopefully it will be available for order by the end of the week, but I can make no guarantees.