Thanksgiving Haters

After a visit to the local big-block hardware store, I was moved to re-post a blog I'd written around this time last year...

Thanksgiving. It’s the ‘lost’ holiday.

It was the end of October when it hit me. I walked into a home improvement store and what did I see? Christmas-topia…Fake lighted Christmas trees, ten foot inflatable Santa’s and Frosty the Snowmen, animatronic talking reindeer, and ornaments galore. But not even a paper cutout of a turkey to decorate the yard with (not that I would).

And then there’s the retail angle where stores are effectively erasing Thanksgiving by starting Black Friday ON Thanksgiving. Sure, maybe it’s great for some shoppers, but what about the employees who work for these companies? Shouldn’t they get some holiday time with their families too? Apparently over 190,000 people think they should, according to this petition.

The last straw for me though was laid down by a local radio station that began playing 24-hour Christmas music in early November, with another station advertising they’ll start doing the same thing tomorrow.

Are you kidding?

We haven’t even hit Thanksgiving for crying out loud, but all I hear or see that’s holiday related is about Christmas. When I was a kid I didn’t see Christmas decor until after the big turkey day, and you could forget about Christmas music until December rolled around.

Thanksgiving has gotten the royal shaft.

-J.M. Park

Social media marketing and writing

So, a little thought on the social media aspect of the game when it comes to writers and writing.  Frequent updates to one's blog draws more attention to your website from the search engines.  This, in turn, allows the writer more chances to captivate potential readers with alluring blog tales (okay, so mine aren't really that alluring), and then hopefully engage them to the point that they want to purchase your book.

But here's the dirty little secret. The more time a writer spends writing blog posts the less time they spend actually writing.  But the less time spent on marketing, which social media represents a big chunk of these days, the less sales and thus less of an audience writers have for their publications.

The sword cuts both ways. So, why am I mentioning this? It's a long and roundabout way of apologizing for the time between my posts over the last month. Wish I had the big marketing teams to do the dirty work for me that the King's and Koontz's and Patterson's have.  Then again, they didn't have them in the beginning either.

Think I just shut myself down. Bummer.

Explanation!

Finally, a chart and a quote that, when put together, explain my existence.

“The test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves.”

—	Logan Pearsall Smith, Afterthoughts, 1931

Why I like historical fiction

Someone asked me the other day why I like writing historical fiction. The truth is I like writing in several genres, but historical fiction offers some perks I can't find in most others. If I were writing a contemporary thriller, for instance, say in the vein of Vince Flynn or Tom Clancy, there are a lot of ways for me to steer a false course. You see, you readers today are much more knowledgable, or are at least able to gain access to facts more conveniently than what authors had to worry about in days past when either the reader knew whether an author got the facts right or not, or they had to spend significant time looking the facts up at a library. Google and Wikipedia changed all that.

Now if I want to play the modern thriller game, I've got to be plugged in to the latest and greatest tech-savvy toys available to super spies and how all the three-letter agencies go about their work. Problem is, much of that info is tough to dig up because it's...well, it's superspy-y. That is, it's not so well advertised. If I choose to write a story that takes place in the past, however, then the tech's already known, the boundaries of the "world" my characters inhabit are known, and it's simply a matter of getting the facts straight about stuff that's already happened or been. No problem, right? Well, not really, but that's another story.

Here's the quick and dirty of my pros and cons on writing historical fiction:

PROS:

• Don't have to worry about keeping up with the latest technologies.
• Sense of nostalgia. I love the feel and atmosphere of some of those old worlds. Whether completely true to the day or not, it is the remembrances each of us have from the experiences told to us from previous generations or through old Hollywood films that sometimes make us wish for simpler times.
• Gives me an excuse to explore, read about and research periods of history that interest me.
• Gives me an excuse to explore, read about and research places in history that interest me.
• It provides automatic boundaries for my world and characters to operate in.

CONS:

• Keeping things historically accurate requires work. True there's not the latest tech I have to know about, but I still have to do the research to make sure I'm at least keeping things respectably accurate.
• As an aside, I do veer off on language occasionally to make things contemporarily accessible. After all, who wants to read in old victorian English? When I read the Lord of the Rings trilogy years ago, I had to keep a dictionary at my side the whole time.
• History is what historians make of it. What one historian writes of a period may not mesh with what another writes, so you've got to pick your poison while doing your research and sell it to the reader sufficiently well enough that they don't bother questioning your facts and just live in and relish the story.

I do want to publish in multiple genres as time goes on. I've got the stories in mind already. This is not necessarily the smartest way forward as a writer. Most say it's best to stick with one genre and develop your audience. But I'm not sure if historical adventure is the best to stick with. While it's fun, it's also a very small niche in the market. As a fledgling author it's important to experiment and see where my voice is strongest. I don't know, but some of those erotica titles my book got listed next to on Amazon looked pretty interesting. 

At the very least, the research would be a hell of a lot of fun!

Hurricane Isaac

It's been hurricane season here on the Gulf Coast for a couple months now, but until good old Isaac showed up we'd been living in suspended disbelief. All said, this one's not so bad. I've been through typhoons in the South Pacific that'd make your testicles climb back up into your body cavity, but the stigma of Katrina still hangs over residents along the Gulf like an abusive owner who has smacked his/her pooch one too many times over the nose with a newspaper. Now even minor hurricanes stir up fear and trepidation, and make residents shy away where once they brazenly confronted these storms with comments like, "I survived Camille, so what else you got?"

Anyone want to take the boat down to Hard Rock tonight?

This is not to lessen the trauma that some will surly feel from Isaac, though. I've watched the news (admittedly from a safe distance since I'm on a working vacation in Houston, TX) as a few residents in low-lying areas have reported their homes flooded into their second stories and of narrow escapes to high ground. There are certain to be more reports of tornado, flood and wind damage as the storm passes over and disaster assessment teams make it out into the field.

I expect I might be one of them when the Red Cross starts activating these teams since I've been volunteering with them for some time now. We'll see. One thing is for sure, though. No longer will anyone on the Gulf doubt that we are in the midst of hurricane season.

That said...hurricane party anyone?

Why I hate pee-pee

Maybe it's a story all authors are familiar with at some point in their careers. I don't know. I just didn't think it would be this early in mine. I guess for lack of a better phrase, I'll just call it the "Lost Edit." Sounds kind of ominous, doesn't it? Well, here's the story.

As some of you may know, I published The Missionary Position in late June to Amazon's Kindle, and then on Smashwords for multiple eBook platforms. It was a fine and decent 'product,' but I recognized it could use some improvements when I had the time to make them. But time was a mysterious anomaly at that point in my life. I understood it existed, but only in the abstract and then only for those souls fortunate enough not to be bogged down in the same quagmire of study as myself. That's how my first foray into publishing TMP went.

Funny how it's not until you're in the homestretch of a project that the glaring mistakes you were completely oblivious to before suddenly become glaringly obvious.  Prior to hitting the publish button for eBook platforms, all seemed fine. Then I pressed the button and BAM! It hit me like a ton of bricks. I had a tense issue - a past tense/future tense conflict. Maybe not a big deal to some, but it bothered the hell out of me and I knew I'd have to fix it before the print edition came out.

Fast forward to August. I should have been studying for my Comprehensive Exams in anticipation of finishing my Master's degree. But I really wanted to get the print edition of TMP published sooner rather than later, so I poured myself into it at the risk of floundering on my Exams. Distracted as I edited? Probably, yes. Did I do as good a job as I would have done if I'd waited until after exams and didn't feel the pressure of other responsibilities tugging at my coattails? Probably not.

And so came the pee-pee. I shake my head as I think about it even now. Poor old Monk. Why did I ever make him say it? It was fine in the initial draft and publication. Yes, the language was coarser (he said "dick" instead of "pee-pee", if you're wondering because you read an earlier draft), but in a moment of doubt over who knows what, I changed the wording in an edit with the mindset that I'd let it sit and then come back and read it over again later (before publication) to see if it resonated okay.

Well, exam time came and I got rushed. By this time I'd completely forgotten about the pee-pee change, and the next time I read over the passage was when the book was published in paperback form...

...and, no, "pee-pee" didn't resonate.

Shit. That was my initial thought. Four letters that pretty much summed up how I felt about pee-pee. I guess it's quaint since both belong in the toilet. There it was, set in print forever. Now I've got a three-year-old's version of what he calls his junk in my book. Worse, I did a blind edit where I took the print edits and put them into the eBooks for updates. Now EVERYONE's got pee-pee in their books.

You're welcome, readers. You're welcome.

Paperback version is now available!

Hi, guys. Just a heads up to let everyone know that The Missionary Position is now available in paperback. You can find it here, or on my Amazon page linked in the right hand column of this blog. In keeping with the low price target, you can purchase the paperback for just $4.99.

I realize it's been a while since my last post, but rest assured there's a good reason. I'm at the conclusion of my Master's program and studying for Comprehensive Examinations, which as it happens begin tomorrow. So, when I'm done here I'll be back in the books again. Trust me when I tell you I'm looking forward to the end of this. I didn't think it was possible to get senioritis at my age, but I'm here to tell you it is.

I'd like nothing more than to quit studying and get back to writing, but I've got too much time and moolah invested in the degree.

Until next time...