Sunday Serenity - Hanging On by Threads

My Quilter's Tote on the table at the Clark County Fair sporting it's blue ribbon. 

I almost broke the blogging ice in August for this.  Instead I started working on crochet WIP that had been put on ice while I focused on this project since June 2012 when I began it as my Secret Santa gift for my sister-in-law.  I only eased the ban for gift-giving occasions until mid 2014 when work on this hit a major snag when my first attempt to assemble the panels created a puddle not a bag.  What use is a tote that must be held open for you while you load it?

So work essentially stopped on this while I noodled on the engineering problem, worked out possible solutions and gathered materials to try them, failed, noodled some more...rinse, repeat.  I still have only partially solved it.  I had to stuff the bag with packing air pillows for the fair display as I ran out of time to implement my full solution.

Since the day I dropped this off at the fairgrounds August 1st, I've started several new projects and gotten several more off the hook.  I'll post about them as soon as I get the photos prepped.

I'm also going to be joining two CAL (Crochet Alongs) this fall.  One is already in progress and the other starts this coming week.

I also started loom knitting in September and have plans to learn to knit.  I've been watching video tutorials on it and no longer feel intimidated.

I've been hanging onto my sanity with my crochet hook since I got my craft table unburied from three feet of detritus in March.  At my counselor's suggestion I began to work on this in earnest with an eye to entering it in the Cowlitz County fair in July.  It was to be an exercise in goal setting and self-promotion and finishing a major WIP.  I missed the deadline for the Cowlitz County fair by several hours.  My sister suggested I look up the reqs for the other county fairs in the area and Clark County was both the next up and the closest.

The ribbon is a Premium Blue and I've no idea what that means in the scheme of things.

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The Mud in My I Makes It Hard To Be Seen

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I am setting out to tackle one of the biggest impediments to attaining my goals: The childhood training that emphasized self-abasement.

The fundamentalist sect I was raised in was obsessed with removing the 'I' out of the child.  There were few if any exertions of will in a child that were not labeled as willful and thus anathema.  Our Sunday School lessons were rife with stories demonstrating pride going before a fall and worksheets displaying a big fat 'I' in the middle of words thus:

SIN    PRIDE    LIE    CRIME    THIEF    CHIEF

That last one, 'chief' was not aimed at Amer-Indians but at the concept of being 'first' or 'leader' or 'in charge' as there was room for only one 'head' on a body and that was Christ.

Though none of those worksheets ever had these words on them I could not help noticing:

CHILD    VOICE    NOISE    OPINE

I found many more such words that escape my memory at the moment.  It is possible that I had a peculiar temperament that took analogies too literally and extrapolated them too far.   However it happened, it became hard for me to even use the word 'I'.

Add to that the further indoctrination against women having a voice or identity outside of 'daughter', 'wife' or 'mother'.  If her opinion differed from her father's or her husband's she was expected to defer and keep silent.  Working outside the home once there was a child was strongly discouraged.

Women and girls who dressed or talked in ways that set them apart or invited attention were likened to harlots.

Having this ingrained in me from infancy makes it very difficult for me to pursue my dream of being a published author.

It also made it hard to seek employment.  How does one write a resume or conduct oneself in a job interview without using the word 'I'?  Forget about submitting manuscripts to publishers as that is blatant strutting.

When I was introduced to the Internet in 1996, I immediately saw the potential for some kind of work-from-home income that would allow me to use my skill set in the controlled environment of home that my visual impairment required.  But every idea and scheme I came up with required that dreaded self-promotion and I could never seem to get over that hurdle.

Self: the other four letter word.

Yes, I put up my first web page in 1997 to display my stories, poems, personal essays and book reviews.  But I did nothing to call attention to it.  I started this blog in 2004 and it was years before I started doing things that drew traffic.  On purpose anyway.

Over the last several years I've been reading obsessively about on-line entrepreneurship, self-publishing, and marketing.  I've followed several aspiring authors as they blogged their journey to success, cheering them on and feeling proud of them when they 'made it'.  But I still struggle with taking the next necessary steps to putting my own self on the line.

That is about to change.

A few weeks ago I received an email from a Writer's Digest Partner offering an incredibly low price for the AWAI copywriting course.  I immediately knew that I needed to do this.  I forwarded it to my husband and shared with him my thoughts on how this skill would be useful in both my own self-publishing endeavors and the online consulting business he hopes to launch even if I didn't end up with other clients.

But one of the perks of the AWAI program is access to a job board where clients come looking for AWAI grads and a group support system that includes students, staff and alumni.  Ready-made networking!  And it would sure help our current situation if I could generate income from other clients.

My hope was that the course itself coupled with the community support might help me find a way to get that mud out of my I and clear a path to success for me.

My husband agreed and he paid for it.  I gained access to the member area and the course materials early this week and have been getting orientated.

Stay tuned as I share my journey toward self-fulfillment.  I have at least one foot on the path now.

I welcome any thoughts on how I might go about overriding that childhood training that makes 'self' feel like a dirty word.

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Big Kindle Boogie - One Day Left

http://bigkindleboogie.blogspot.com/
http://www.facebook.com/BigKindleBoogie

There are 10 Kindle Fires up for grabs.  And to top it off the winner of the first drawing also gets $500 donated to their local public library.  As bad as I want a Kindle Fire (any Kindle actually) I would be more thrilled to see that money go to our Jackson County Library System which continues to struggle like a transplant patient on life-support ever since the six month closure in 2007.  So I love that these guys are adding that grace note to their boogie.

I have downloaded all of my copies of the 75 books.  Those I didn't already have from the Kindle Fire Giveaway Scott Nicholson participated in with two other inde authors a couple of weeks ago.  The books among them that I'm the most excited about aren't the novels and short story collections but rather the non-fic books on writing, self-publishing, being an indie author and all that entails including promotion.  So even if you think the genre of story these guys write is not your cup of tea but you are an aspiring writer yourself you might find those books helpful.

I am participating in these events and the virtual author blog tours of the previous two days posts as part of my investigation into the inde option for publishing my own stories.  I believe it takes more than reading books about it.  Watching someone who made it work in action is worth a thousand how-to manuals.  And as I've discussed here before, self promotion is a very alien concept to me because of the way I was raised to believe that it was the equivalent to bragging which in turn was evidence of prIde which was a sIn.  Note the big fat capital 'I' in the middle of those dirty words.  Evidence, see, that when you put your big, fat, selfish self into the middle of something you are standing on a slippery slope on the edge of the abyss and nothing good can come of it.

I learned that before grade school and fifty years later still can't shake it.  Even after eight years of blogging.

Funny thing is tho, whatever in me generates that anxiety and self-disgust surrounding efforts at calling attention to myself does not translate to feeling disgust with others I'm observing in action doing the very thing I can't seem to allow myself to do.  I even have vicarious joy in watching them succeed as I cheer them on.  That seems to indicate to me that this is not a core value of mine but rather something more like a Pavlov response.

So I wonder if I were to create a pen name and instill an alter ego in it and publish and promote under it would my 'I' feel free to cheer on it's alter 'I' and allow it to succeed?  

OMG my brain hurts.

Actually if I had my druthers I'd rather give my alter 'I' all the baggage of the  'self=sin' paradigm and write under my own name.  Which BTW means 'joy reborn'.

OK so this post went places I never intended.  Only the pic and the first paragraph was planned when I opened the draft and I almost clicked on publish but then thought to say something about the free books.  This is what happens when I start typing after being awake over twenty hours--just hit 36.  Which is probably why I do it so often.  24 to 44 hour wake periods are to me what alcohol is to the drunk--a form of self medication that lowers anxiety and inhibition.

I wish I could bottle whatever it is that floods my brain sometime after twenty hours awake and take a swig upon waking.

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Arielle Ford: The Golden Age of Authors: Why Books Are Alive and Well

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Arielle Ford: The Golden Age of Authors: Why Books Are Alive and Well:

'via Blog this'

The stats are in:

Americans, young and old, are reading actively in all print and digital formats

This makes a great follow up to yesterday's post regarding the, to my mind misguided, war between Amazon.com and similar online platforms for publishing and distribution of print media and the old vanguard of big publishing houses and big bookstore chains.

The truth is showing up in the numbers but why isn't it just plain intuitive that if you have more of something available in more formats more people will use it?  And if you have formats that can reach billions in seconds isn't it obvious more appetites will be whetted and sated?

One of the really amazing things about the web is the way those with similar tastes can find each other and in their digital fellowship know exactly how to provide the very thing that answers to their fellow fan's craving.

Once maybe a new author or artist needed the echelon of professional editors and promoters the big publishing houses provided because the tools required to do it well were expensive and often individually too large for the family garage let alone the family room.  Now all of those same tools and techniques are available to anyone from the fourteen year old Junior High geek to the frumpy granny in gingham.  All of them together fitting in junior's backpack or granny's handbag.  As long as they have web access, curiosity and the willingness to learn they can avail themselves of all the same techniques the old bastion used to generate hype and create desires only they could fulfill.

The difference being that for them the cost of such promotion was so prohibitive they could only do it for a few and in order to profit had to create huge mass audiences for their fair.  Not so for granny and junior. They can start reaping profit with only a few thousand fans/customers and yet if persistent can go on to create the tidal wave of want known as going viral that can put them on the map.

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Friday Forays In Fiction: The Future?

I've been seeing these around all over the book blogs and wondering what they were about exactly. I wasn't immediately excited because recent experience with electronic screens had dampened my enthusiasm. I was, for example, extremely disappointed when I bought my laptop in 2005 to discover that I could not read the screen outdoors in daylight. The same thing happened with my new digital camera I got for Christmas last year. I can't see the image in the LED screen in sunlight. Even on cloudy days it is only very faint. So I feared the same problem would hold for an e-book device. But ever since I read the product description last Sunday and learned that the Kindle's screen is not backlit and can be read from any angle either indoors or out, I was intrigued. More than intrigued. I started to drool (in a virtual way) and the more I read about it the more I liked what I saw.

These are the features I like:

• A readable screen
• Long battery life for reading (less long when useing the wireless) and quick recharge
  
• Adjustable font size--my poor eyes just looooove this.
  
• An onboard dictionary to look up words encountered while reading.
• An ability to subscribe to newspapers and blogs
• A QUERTY keyboard for typing search terms, orders from the Kindle store and notes on reading
• It comes with room to store approximately 200 books but a memory card can be added to expand that to 4000. sigh. droooool. No more second bag for my traveling library.
• But if you run out of room and need to delete material to make room for new orders or you loose your Kindle--no worries Amazon stores your Media library for you and it can be downloaded again at anytime.
• The cost of recently released hardbacks in Kindle format is only $9.99! That is like one half to one third of the cost of most new books! In fact fairly close to the price of the mass market paperback that isn't released for over a year. And no trees have to die!

But alas. With a ticket price of $359 and our current circumstances, I'm sure Suze Orman would say DENIED! So for now I drool.

But none of the above really qualifies this for a topic in Friday Forays in Fiction which is reserved for topics relevant to the craft and business of writing fiction. What I got to thinkng about after I got an email from NaNoWriMo a couple days ago made it relevant to the publishing of one's fiction though which is a topic concidered very relevent by most fiction writers.

The email from NaNoWriMo announced that a deal had been struck with CreateSpace which is owned by Amazon to provide every NaNoWriMo winner with a free proof copy of their NaNo novel. Beginning retroactively with 2007 winners. Not only can they get that free paperback proof copy but they can choose to offer their novel for sale on the CreateSpace site.

My mind instantly made the connections between the two Amazon endeavors and saw a future in which fiction writers could bypass the tyranny of the publishing industry gatekeepers: agents, editors, bean counters, the hostage holding of manuscripts, the catch 22 of needing to be published in order to get published and all of the rest of the hurdles that tend to curdle the aspiring writer's soul.

Self-publishing using methods that would combine the potential of the Kindle technology with that of CreateSpace and the promotional potential of blogs and websites could put the power back in the hands of the writers. The creators, the providers of content could dictate the terms instead of groveling at the gates of industry moguls who have to care more about buildings, printing presses, payroll, paper, ink and advertising than they do about art.

And oh yes more trees would live!

BTW Oprah announced the Kindle as her new fav gadget today and gave them to her audience with the current book club selection, The Story of Edgar Sawtell loaded already. And for the watching audience Amazon is providing $50 off for anyone using the special code at checkout. You'll find that special code at Oprah.com. The offer is good only through November 1st.

$50 off $359 is a significant savings but not enough to get me the Suze Orman APPROVED. Sigh.

OK I've been watching too much CNBC this month.

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Adapting To Change

Tonight is the third out of the last four nights that I have moved out to the living room with my laptop as my husband and his mother headed to bed. Change is hard for me as I've mentioned here often before. But I knew there would be benefits to making the move. Fewer interruptions of my work from my husband and cat for one. Better place to sit. Just about anything that is not the bed is a better place to sit. Once I get used to it, I should see more productivity. I mean just the time saved from having to wake up my snoozing legs or shake out a cramp should pay off in dividends don't you think?

One of the benefits of moving out did not occur to me until this afternoon though when it suddenly flashed into my consciousness that there was no reason I had to let the PC sit idle just because I had my laptop. I could keep the PC busy surfing for credit. Sometimes with the autosurf version where you don't have to watch to earn the credit and other times with the ones you have to click a number to prove you are human and watching. The autosurf could run while i was working on a post or some other type of writing on the laptop, or researching online with multiple windows already open in my browser and thus not wanting my laptop busy opening autosurf pages every ten to thirty seconds. And then when I wanted to take a short break from what I am working on I could swing around to the other computer and earn some credits by browsing the blogs in one of the other type.

This project would be good for me in more than one way. As I have mentioned before, I have as much difficulty with self-promotion as I do with change. I don't mean difficulty grasping concepts of methods of promotion. I mean difficulty grasping the concept that self-promotion is a thing to be desired and not despised. This is partly due to the innate shyness I was born with but more substantially due to the fundamentalist Christian principles of the vamily and Church community I was born into. Calling attention to ones self was considered more than bad taste or improper but outright sinful. This was especially true for women and even more so for children.

We were reminded constantly that 'i' was the middle letter--and thus the center-of sIn, prIde, and crIme. Of course most who purported to live by this principle were much better at spotting the I-centered behavior in others than they were in themselves. But that is neither here nor there. Except that it explains why I get so anxious whenever I am confronted with promotional tasks. This includes asking someone to read my work which makes the idea of mailing out manuscripts or query letters nerve wracking. And it also explains why I tended to shy away from doing those things that were essentially designed to call attention to ones blog.

I would ( it is hard even to begin a paragraph with 'I'. Usually I would sit and stew over how to word what I want to say until I could find a way of starting the sentence with a different word. Instead I am adding this parentheses and moving on.)

I would occasionally implement one of those site promotion techniques but even if I managed to work up some enthusiasm at the beginning, I would soon find myself overwhelmed by doubts and feelings of self-disgust. Events like last week's loss of my laptop's power cord were all too easy to interpret as punishments for hubris.

This type of swinging from one pole to the other is not conducive to making a success of any endeavor but especially one where the element of self-promotion is absolutely crucial. Setting aside the issue that writer's can't get an audience without calling attention to their writing....

Without some kind of reaching out there is also no way to take advantage of how well this Internet and computer technology can accommodate my special needs and turn my special talents and skill-set into something marketable and thus allow me to become a contributing member of my family and not just one of the burdens dragging the rest of them down.

Probably the only reason I can occasionally contemplate the necessary promotional tasks is that the dictum to be productive and to pull your own weight was at least as strong as the one against self-promotion. If my husband and I are ever going to get into our own place again, it is going to take more than the single paycheck from a job with seasonal fluctuations in hours.

So taking baby steps once more I am going to practice self-promotion. As I achieve 21 straight days of posting with this post, I will celebrate with the resolve to add the habit of promotion to my daily checklist. One small thing every day. Maybe by the end of another 21 days the harshest edge of the anxiety associated with self-promotion will be blunted. Don't they call that immersion therapy?

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