If my heart was exposed (and not metaphorically)

Yesterday, instead of driving myself, I had a driver.  I spent two one-and-a-half-hour stints with a man who considered his life events to be of unquestionable interest. I was the lucky listener of his step by step quadruple bypass reenactment, his recovery, the mean things he said under valium, the crazy things he said upon easing out of anesthesia, where they harvested the repair veins and finally what they served him for breakfast on the third day (ham and eggs and orange juice) all of which he ate.  Included was the electrifying diagnosis scene where the medics hovered in a circle and hemmed and hawed over stents vs full by-pass.  

This might have been interesting to me as a writer had I not heard the exact story when this same person had driven me before and had the event not been already seven years in the past. The recurring theme in his story was always the man’s triumph over the questionable things that would happen to a person less stubborn, less savvy.  The system always gave way to his burly will.

As regular readers know, I can do a blog on the addictive qualities of barley.   If I had quadruple by pass surgery and my heart was exposed (not metaphorically) outside my body, I would probably talk about it non-stop in a continuous loop whether anyone was around to hear or not.   I would let people tune in and out and just stay as long as they wanted.  In my version, however, the system would not only win over my will I would just hope they put the heart back in the right place.  So who am I to question the three hour monologue interrupted only occasionally(and without warning) to reprimand other drivers?

When the story was done I got out my Kindle but it was not to be.  “If you thought that was wild, wait till you hear this, “ said the man.  He didn’t even look back to see if I was still there .  I un-slumped myself and he launched into the saga of his son’s entry into the police force.  It was a done deal (through connections) but then the call didn’t come and then it did come.  The boy was in the probation group but because of a trick question he got out of the probation group immediately.  The unifying theme in this family was always: the system gives way for them.

The most interesting things I heard came in monologue three.

If a cop gets hurt in the line of duty, he collects 3/4 of his pay.

If a cop gets killed in the line of duty, his widow only collects half his pay.

Civil Service employees are cleaning up in the pension department, double and sometimes triple dipping by gaming the system.  And these “pension” fables become tales to be recounted with awe.  You can be a firefighter and at the same time be an instructor and get a teacher’s pension as well as your firefighters pension and maybe even a military pension if you were in the reserve. 

I also learned that when firefighters go in to a burning building they are already carrying one-hundred and fifty pounds of gear so their oxygen supply doesn't last more than 15 minutes.  They approach a room on their stomach with a buddy hanging on to their foot and they feel around  for anything soft on the floor.  Sometimes it’s just the couch cushion.

Do I dare to eat a peach?

As I mentioned Viking/Penguin is under the impression that I have an influential blog and besides sending me lots of new books to review they also sent me this news via e-mail.

If there's anyone out there who would rather show off their poetry memorization skills than play Angry Birds, etc. this might be of interest. (For some reason I can still recite most of The Love Song of J. Alfred  Prufrock  by T.S. Eliot who was born in Missouri and also wrote The Wasteland (not to be confused with Newton Minow's comment about television that described it as a "vast wasteland."   Also the 'Quality of Mercy' speech from The Merchant of Venice.  Go figure. I know my readers are far more selective and also erudite (I'm going to look this word up right now.) It means learned and scholarly.  So here's all the information.

Dear Consuelo,

I’m very happy to share that the newest free app from Penguin, Poems By Heart from Penguin Classics, is available today for iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch. Five levels of difficulty, 23 achievements, and 20 ranks of mastery make memorizing “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” easy, quick, and fun, and shareable with friends. 

The app also comes with a free William Blake poem, and 22 more classic poems are available for purchase from authors including Dickinson, Keats, Poe, Shakespeare, Shelley, Tennyson, and Whitman.

You can watch a video about the app here which you are welcome to post and the landing page for the app on the Penguin website is here.

I do hope you’ll download the app! Let me know if you have any questions and Happy National Poetry Month!

Best,

Langan

The Manchurian Candidate but with barley

When I made barley for the first time I couldn’t stop eating it.  I kept going back to the big pot and ate it all day long.  About 4 p.m. I began to feel sick and disoriented.  My mouth tasted like lead but I continued eating the barley.  Something in my mouth, my saliva, my salivary glands, my right brain or my left brain steered me to the pot, put a spoon in my hand and put more barley in my mouth.  I was like the Manchurian Candidate but with barley.

As I do with most grains, I had bypassed the recipe on the package and substituted lemon juice for some of the water and added salt and butter so it was like the best thing I had tasted in a long time.  Not that it mattered.  I was cramming the barley into my mouth so fast and chewing it so carelessly that it could have been flavored with roadside oil slick.  I wasn’t really tasting it.

I never made barley again.  When I passed the barley in the store I shivered and soon after I was gratified to learn that barley was full of the devil gluten anyway so there was no need to long for it. 

Last week I received A five pound bag of quinoa.  What the heck was I going to do with five pounds of a grain that was already annoyingly overpronounced (like Alex Trebek upchucking his tonsils to say Nicaragua) so that you had to Crazy Glue your hands to your pants to keep from slapping someone.  One day I had nothing to eat in the house (it happens) and I made some of the quinoa.  In my usual maverick style, I made it with lemon juice and water plus butter and red pepper flakes.  Do I need to tell you what happened?  Do you know that song Sugartime by Johnny Cash?  Quinoa in the morning, quinoa in the evening, quinoa at suppertime. Be my little quinoa fix and I’ll love you all the time.

The Devil Wears Sub-Zero

 (This is a re-run.  Originally titled "I want to kill the kitchen.")

I read on Yahoo that the home of 2015 probably won’t have a living room. Builders expect the living room to merge with other spaces or vanish completely. I’ve written countless times that the living room is a useless place we’ve been told is necessary. My living room starts at the front door, it’s hard to miss but I hardly use it except as a corridor to the kitchen, the bathroom and the bedroom.
Here’s a recent conversation I had with the living room.
“What are you doing in here? Is the pastor coming over?”
“I don’t have a pastor. I feel I should use you more."
“Why? There’s nothing to do in here. No media. No computer. You don’t even know me that well. You never really look at me.”
“I look at you.”
“You look ahead when you walk through me.”
“Do you think you have any purpose?”
“Years ago they called me ‘the parlor’ and people ‘paid calls’ and sat here and had tea. It was a little phony but everyone was polite. Today everybody goes right to the ‘oink, oink’ kitchen. That hog, has taken over everything. It doesn’t have a door anymore. It’s creeping into the whole house. It is the whole house! Soon the word ‘house’ will die out. You’ll buy a kitchen.”
“How did that happen?”
“Good p.r. The kitchen was sold as a touchy-feely cozy place that you could visit in your pajamas. Ooooh the kitchen inspires confidences. Blah, blah, blah. Everybody was sucked in. Oooh this is my safe place. Is marble cozy? Is Sub-Zero cozy? Is stainless steel cozy? Exactly. The devil wears Bosch.”
“But the kitchen is necessary.”
"Really? Does anyone cook anymore? Uncle Ben makes perfect rice in a bag. Store-made rotisserie chickens are reliably tasty. Salad comes washed and cut up in a container. No waste. No dirty pans.”
“You think we’ve been duped.”
“Like lambs to the slaughter. I want to kill the kitchen. I've made a song about it to the tune of Imagine.
Imagine there’s no kitchen,
It’s easy if you try
No hellish food to tempt us
The fridge has gone bye bye
Imagine all the women
Living slim and free...
Imagine there’s no butter
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to fry or whisk up
And no pesto too
Imagine all the women
Living life in peace
You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope all fat girls will join me
Let’s kill the kitchen. Bang, bang. Done!

“So living room, I guess this is good bye.”
“What are you going to do with my space?”
“Probably open it up and expand the kitchen.”
“Why did I even bother? Yeah okay goodbye. Whatever.”

I became lonely when it was about to end

I'm in my review clothes today for the novel Me Before You by Jojo Moyes

I don’t know what to make of this book. Let’s see if I can deconstruct why I liked it so much.  The set up grabbed me because of its ordinariness: a family with two grown daughters is struggling in a poor economy and one of the daughters, (the one no one has faith in) gets a weird job that will save the others from slipping into poverty.  Oh, and it takes place in a small English village which raises the interest level for American readers by a hundred.

As in life, the likeability factor played a big part in my total interest in the outcome. Did you notice I said “total” interest?  I wanted to get back to my reading and I became lonely when it was about to end.  Yes, lonely.   The major and minor characters were endearing and when unlikely events began to infiltrate and better their lives it was within parameters that were believable and satisfying, not life changing (although life did change as it always does).  The last part of my deconstruct has to do with what we call a “love story” and how we yearn for someone right along with the main character.  I yearned right along with Louisa Clark and that’s as much as one can ask for in a book.

(Will blog again later with my own ramblings.)

Less = happiness? Define less.

 The N.Y. Times had an Op-Ed piece by tech multi-millionaire Graham Hill who had an awakening:  he once had a fondness for stuff and lived large and now he doesn’t want the stuff and lives small. How small? 420 sq. ft.  On first reading, your head starts singing “Oh happy day. Oh happy day. When Jesus washed. My sins away.”

Mr. Hill heads a firm LifeEdited that designed his tiny apartment as a prototype to coax us into joining him in his newly calibrated life.  The renovation that transformed an honest 420 sq. ft. of lovely undifferentiated space into 8 possible rooms cost around $300,000. The 8 rooms are made possible by a multitude of hidden, stacked, double-duty load of high-tech preciousness including a moveable wall that holds some of the rooms in suspension, a collapsible table that seats 10 ($15,000), a desk in a drawer, drop down bunks for guests and a full-size media room/home theater achieved by moving the magic wall all the way to another wall. 

 Mr. Hill wants to persuade us to edit the way we live and consume because possessions are the problem not the solution. But instead of torpedoing our old perversions in his prototype, his stupido apartment has glorified our stupido old habits that made us feel empty in the first place. We wanted to get away from our media room. Wasn't that the point?

The master plan of the apartment is to cleverly hide all the stuff we need to live there behind inscrutable cabinets.  Life becomes a freak show of premeditation.  You have to hunt for and unstack the induction burners to cook.  Un-telescope the table to eat. Get your desk out of the wall to work. Push the freaking wall to get to the television.

I like to read at a big table and I like to sort out stuff on a big table and I like to put a small appliance (toaster/toaster oven/electric teapot all on the table or a trolley nearby. I need the table available all the time. The designers should have spent a day with their mothers and watched how they live.    They would then skip the bs moveable wall and the drop down bunk beds and the cleverness.

I could live with a small bed, a table, a big easy chair, a flat bottomed bowl, a cup, a sharp knife, a spoon, two good sweaters, three tunics, a half dozen leggings, a knit hat, two scarves, a down vest, a towel and those 18 washcloths from Wal-Mart that cost 3.95.  For cooking, I would have a deep frying/sautéing pan and a two-quart saucepan for rice, oatmeal, spaghetti, a blender or small chopper for smoothies or soup.  I would LifeEdit my food intake, too.

Many comments were left by other readers of Mr. Hill’s essay. Here are a couple I liked a lot:

“'Not enough' is the soul-grinding, joy-crushing truth for very much of this world's population. We'd do better to tend to that rather than fetishize our ability to more elegantly calibrate our own abundance.”

“I'm 82 and live on and with the barest of necessities, for the less I have, the better I feel. I regularly go through my small house wondering what else I can get rid of. Minimalism is soothing, aesthetically appealing. I sometimes fantasize about living in a cell like a monk - a cot, a table, and a window. “

"If I had lots and lots of money I'm quite sure that I'd quickly learn to buy freedom and 'experiences' rather than stuff, too. That's what this article is about." 

“Knowing what I know now, if I had my life to live over, at the age of 18, instead of sitting around devising plans for a cluttered life, I would put a knapsack on my back and with my dog I would leave the house and just start walking.”

Taking care of business

In the honeymoon period of e-publishing, I was completely in its thrall. After decades of cowering under trad pub snobbishness, crushing rejections, marketing laziness and worst of all taking a year or more to publish a book, writers got a fairy godfather in the form of Jeff Bezos (Amazon) who offered a fabulous alternative.

Jeff Bezos turned the ether into the best bookstore in the world and this bookstore didn’t yank your books after two weeks or put them on a high shelf.  This bookstore kept your books on display for as long as you wanted.  Jeff Bezos said: “Here, this is for all of you writers.  It’s free.  It’s inclusive.  It’s global. I’ll sell your books for a tiny fraction of what the big six charge and you get to control everything. Instead of getting paltry royalties twice a year and never earning out your advances, you can set your book price, put your book on sale, change your cover, tweak your blurbs and experiment with marketing.  And you can do any of this in a matter of minutes.  You can track your sales 24/7. Instead of rejection notes, we send congratulatory e-mails.  Is there any writer out there who doesn’t see this as a miracle?

Fast forward to 2013.  The e-book business is still the best marketplace however the landscape has changed, In the old days (2009-2011) a price of 0.99 was a sure way to drive sales and you could count on volume to justify the low price.  When that ploy glutted the market and dimmed as a marketing tool, the “free” maneuver came to the rescue.  If you let your book go free for a couple of days and got enough sites to mention the free book, a gush of sales followed when the book went back to ‘paid’.  It had to do with something called algorithms that enhanced your book’s visibility.  (Sales are all about visibility.)  Free downloads became so popular that actual sales slowed. Free wasn’t working as well.  Newly re-configured algorithms reduced the book’s visibility. In the last half of 2012 sales sank for many e-books.  In early 2013, I went to my favorite forum, The Writer’s Cafe, and noticed several people were asking about advertising and seeking reliable sites for their ad dollars. 

I am, by nature, frugal.  The idea of paying for advertising took some mental adjustment but when I saw several books shoot up in the rankings after an ad on BookBub, I decided to give it a go even though it could cost hundreds of dollars that I might not earn back.   BookBub has an editorial review board that sometimes turns down requests for advertising.  They check out your oeuvre on Amazon, reviews, etc. to see if the title will fit their model for a successful run.  They want you to earn out the cost of the ad.

My first ad with BookBub was for Nothing To Lose.   I had asked to advertise 100 Open Houses but they “advised” me to choose something else. The editors at BookBub placed NTL in the Women’s Fiction category and charged me  $130 (currently $180.)  I was so pleased with the results of this ad I scheduled another for last Sunday.  This ad was for Daughters and it cost $280.

The first ad was very successful selling almost 1800 books and sending NTL up the ranks to #134 (from about a million books.) I had made back my money three hours in.  The second promotion was even more successful selling over 4100 units and placing Daughters as high as #23 in the Kindle 100 and as high as #10 in the Nook 100.  Both books went to #1 or #2 in their genre category and with Daughters, my rank as most popular author rose to #62. Again I made back my money before the day was half done. Most of these lofty rankings begin to slide after a day or two but sales linger.

In the future, ads might fade as a sure-fire way to produce sales or ad prices may become prohibitive. Something else will come along.  I could just do nothing and be satisfied with reduced sales.  The important lesson is that when necessary, I know how to put on my big girl shoes and take care of business. I am finally a grown up.