Yes! I fell off the face of the Earth!!
And now I am back on the face of the Earth. Can you see me there? I'm that tiny little black dot, waving at you!!
Part of my absentee problem was that my wireless died. HP tech help was sad to inform me that while they knew this sudden complete & thorough disappearance of the built-in wireless hardware was a known feature in my particular laptop, and while they had extended my warranty by a year b/c of it without telling me, that extension expired a really long time ago and so, alas, until I can get out to the store and buy a WiFi adapter, I am in Old-fashioned Land and actually connected to a DSL cable!!
The other reason for my disappearance, of course, is b/c Bill arrived!! Yay!! He is sleeping now -- which is another way of saying he is momentarily free of my constant chattering at him. (Double-yay!!) (No, we have not had an actual picnic yet, but the other night we did eat our dinner outside on the picnic table. It doesn't count as a picnic, however, b/c it wasn't special "picnic food," it was simply our regular dinner that we could have easily eaten on any other table in the house.) (And while we were eating, we were very quietly and civilized-ly regaled by the pro-wrestler next door cleaning twigs and dead leaves and debris from off his roof. I never clean anything off my roof. Roof maintenance doesn't happen around here, hence my really clogged gutters. I can't even imagine having a free moment in my ladder-less world wherein I could figure out how to get up on my roof and then clean it. Mr. Pro-Wrestler is apparently a very responsible home-owner type guy and no one to be scoffed at (anymore).)
Wow. So! You have no idea what it feels like to switch so suddenly from talking only to cats, to talking to somebody who actually understands your language and replies. Then you say something else, and he replies again. It is so startling. And it goes on & on -- this exchange of sentences. It's what is known, in civilized territories, as conversation.
We did sort of jump head-first into career-land -- trying to take care of all this book promotion stuff that's been steadily piling up. Not only is it a godsend to have Bill's help with this, but also to have someone to bounce ideas off of. I'm the type of person who is likely to wake-up around 4 AM with a bunch of angst that requires fresh ideas in order to get out of the angst and then become angst-free and go back to sleep (for 30 or so minutes -- but, hey, at least it's more sleep.). So it really is a godsend for me to have someone with a long history in the publishing world, who knows viscerally how much it has changed over the last several years & how it is never, ever, EVER going to change back, as much as we would all really like it to so that we could start earning money again and have these bright, shiny, & thrilling careers once more -- well, it's good to be able to exchange ideas with someone who knows all about that. So I am really just truly blessed, gang.
Plus, I have these stories piling up inside me (as well as some really conscientiously-filed story notes -- meaning: the notes are scattered hither & yon). At first, I thought I would simply write the new stories as screenplays. But now I think I will write them as short novels and then adapt them as screenplays. So the other night, I was telling Bill about the various plots to these stories piling up inside me. And one of the stories is in the horror genre, where the helpless woman triumphs over the bad guy with the help of relatives, and I said to Bill, "But I don't really know yet how they overpower him."
Bill [without even blinking]: "Well, just make him the archetypal villain, figure out what his Achilles heal is and then have the community reflect that back at him in order to scare him into submission."
Me [slight sound of crickets chirping in the dead silence of my astounded brain]: "Sure. Yes. Of course I could do that."
He had suggestion after suggestion for every plot I told him about and suddenly I went from having this accumulation of story ideas in my head, to really, really wanting to get started with writing them down. I tell you, gang, not that the stories don't gestate inside me, but I do find myself trailing off into lah-lah land most of the time these days. (And I don't mean Los Angeles. Well, I guess I do mean Los Angeles, but the Los Angeles of the 1920s & 30s; not any sort of Los Angeles that we would generally recognize today.)
Without resorting to whining & complaining, my career arc goes something like this: I used to write up a storm b/c I had so many stories longing to burst forth from me, and so I wrote them down joyously without worrying at all about getting them published, or where or how. Then everything I wrote started to get published. Then publishers called, asking me to write books or edit anthologies for them. Then my print runs would be bought up almost entirely by Barnes & Noble, and then B&N stores coast to coast would carry pretty much every one of my books and you could go in and ask the clerk in which section could you find books written by Marilyn Jaye Lewis and the clerk would be able to tell you. Then almost all my publishers went out of business on the same day. Then nothing I write gets carried in "brick & mortar" stores, they are only sold on the Internet and readers complain to me, "Marilyn, I can't find any of your new books in Barnes & Noble." Me: "That's b/c none of them are carried in Barnes & Noble anymore. You have to special order them." My publishers are now small POD presses, or eBook publishers or myself.
This shift has happened to most writers of my generation, regardless of what genre they write in. There is some comfort in "numbers" but it doesn't show "the way" onward from here. So I find that now when I have stories inside me wanting to be told, I make some notes and then almost immediately come up against that wall of how no one will publish them as actual "books" anymore, they will be POD or eBooks, and then I will have to add it to the heap of already-published POD or eBooks I have out that need promoting by me otherwise no one on Earth will even know they've been published, etc., etc. And that's when my mind starts trailing off to lah-lah land.
So really what I need is to revert back to the very beginning of the career arc, wherein I wrote for the sheer pleasure of telling stories and not worry about any of the rest of it. And having Bill here and getting his input, makes me feel very excited again about that simple storytelling process. It really does.
Hence, you can see why I say that I am just truly blessed, gang.
On that note, I hope you are all having the best Saturday possible, wherever you are and whatever you're doing!! And if I owe you an email, please be patient. I am going to start tackling that mound of correspondence immediately! Thanks for visiting, gang! See ya!
Part of my absentee problem was that my wireless died. HP tech help was sad to inform me that while they knew this sudden complete & thorough disappearance of the built-in wireless hardware was a known feature in my particular laptop, and while they had extended my warranty by a year b/c of it without telling me, that extension expired a really long time ago and so, alas, until I can get out to the store and buy a WiFi adapter, I am in Old-fashioned Land and actually connected to a DSL cable!!
The other reason for my disappearance, of course, is b/c Bill arrived!! Yay!! He is sleeping now -- which is another way of saying he is momentarily free of my constant chattering at him. (Double-yay!!) (No, we have not had an actual picnic yet, but the other night we did eat our dinner outside on the picnic table. It doesn't count as a picnic, however, b/c it wasn't special "picnic food," it was simply our regular dinner that we could have easily eaten on any other table in the house.) (And while we were eating, we were very quietly and civilized-ly regaled by the pro-wrestler next door cleaning twigs and dead leaves and debris from off his roof. I never clean anything off my roof. Roof maintenance doesn't happen around here, hence my really clogged gutters. I can't even imagine having a free moment in my ladder-less world wherein I could figure out how to get up on my roof and then clean it. Mr. Pro-Wrestler is apparently a very responsible home-owner type guy and no one to be scoffed at (anymore).)
Wow. So! You have no idea what it feels like to switch so suddenly from talking only to cats, to talking to somebody who actually understands your language and replies. Then you say something else, and he replies again. It is so startling. And it goes on & on -- this exchange of sentences. It's what is known, in civilized territories, as conversation.
We did sort of jump head-first into career-land -- trying to take care of all this book promotion stuff that's been steadily piling up. Not only is it a godsend to have Bill's help with this, but also to have someone to bounce ideas off of. I'm the type of person who is likely to wake-up around 4 AM with a bunch of angst that requires fresh ideas in order to get out of the angst and then become angst-free and go back to sleep (for 30 or so minutes -- but, hey, at least it's more sleep.). So it really is a godsend for me to have someone with a long history in the publishing world, who knows viscerally how much it has changed over the last several years & how it is never, ever, EVER going to change back, as much as we would all really like it to so that we could start earning money again and have these bright, shiny, & thrilling careers once more -- well, it's good to be able to exchange ideas with someone who knows all about that. So I am really just truly blessed, gang.
Plus, I have these stories piling up inside me (as well as some really conscientiously-filed story notes -- meaning: the notes are scattered hither & yon). At first, I thought I would simply write the new stories as screenplays. But now I think I will write them as short novels and then adapt them as screenplays. So the other night, I was telling Bill about the various plots to these stories piling up inside me. And one of the stories is in the horror genre, where the helpless woman triumphs over the bad guy with the help of relatives, and I said to Bill, "But I don't really know yet how they overpower him."
Bill [without even blinking]: "Well, just make him the archetypal villain, figure out what his Achilles heal is and then have the community reflect that back at him in order to scare him into submission."
Me [slight sound of crickets chirping in the dead silence of my astounded brain]: "Sure. Yes. Of course I could do that."
He had suggestion after suggestion for every plot I told him about and suddenly I went from having this accumulation of story ideas in my head, to really, really wanting to get started with writing them down. I tell you, gang, not that the stories don't gestate inside me, but I do find myself trailing off into lah-lah land most of the time these days. (And I don't mean Los Angeles. Well, I guess I do mean Los Angeles, but the Los Angeles of the 1920s & 30s; not any sort of Los Angeles that we would generally recognize today.)
Without resorting to whining & complaining, my career arc goes something like this: I used to write up a storm b/c I had so many stories longing to burst forth from me, and so I wrote them down joyously without worrying at all about getting them published, or where or how. Then everything I wrote started to get published. Then publishers called, asking me to write books or edit anthologies for them. Then my print runs would be bought up almost entirely by Barnes & Noble, and then B&N stores coast to coast would carry pretty much every one of my books and you could go in and ask the clerk in which section could you find books written by Marilyn Jaye Lewis and the clerk would be able to tell you. Then almost all my publishers went out of business on the same day. Then nothing I write gets carried in "brick & mortar" stores, they are only sold on the Internet and readers complain to me, "Marilyn, I can't find any of your new books in Barnes & Noble." Me: "That's b/c none of them are carried in Barnes & Noble anymore. You have to special order them." My publishers are now small POD presses, or eBook publishers or myself.
This shift has happened to most writers of my generation, regardless of what genre they write in. There is some comfort in "numbers" but it doesn't show "the way" onward from here. So I find that now when I have stories inside me wanting to be told, I make some notes and then almost immediately come up against that wall of how no one will publish them as actual "books" anymore, they will be POD or eBooks, and then I will have to add it to the heap of already-published POD or eBooks I have out that need promoting by me otherwise no one on Earth will even know they've been published, etc., etc. And that's when my mind starts trailing off to lah-lah land.
So really what I need is to revert back to the very beginning of the career arc, wherein I wrote for the sheer pleasure of telling stories and not worry about any of the rest of it. And having Bill here and getting his input, makes me feel very excited again about that simple storytelling process. It really does.
Hence, you can see why I say that I am just truly blessed, gang.
On that note, I hope you are all having the best Saturday possible, wherever you are and whatever you're doing!! And if I owe you an email, please be patient. I am going to start tackling that mound of correspondence immediately! Thanks for visiting, gang! See ya!
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