Once Again, Bringing Books To Readers

Pumpkin people, in case you couldn't tell.

It's been a while since I've featured a children's author or a children's book or, I think, any kind of in-person author appearance here. You all know how I love Zoom. But I was at Pumpkintown USA today, which in this part of Connecticut is a big deal. I'm not being sarcastic. We love Pumpkintown in these parts. While I was walking around, I was reminded of a blog post I did around nine years ago, Getting Books Out Into The World, about Connecticut author Sandra Horning, who did a signing at Pumpkintown, as well as two other nontraditional sites, to promote a pumpkin picture book. No sooner did I start thinking about her, then what did I see but another author doing a book signing!

Peggy Schaedler, author, not pumpkin person

Author Peggy Schaedler was there supporting a series of books she's written about characters based on Pumpkintown characters. She's doing a number of weekend appearances there. Now, given that her books involve Pumpkintown it makes a great deal of sense that she should be making appearances there. Nonetheless, years ago you wouldn't have seen someone like her at a place like this, just as you wouldn't have seen someone like Sandra Horning there. They would have been at a bookstore or library.

Times have changed.

In large part, this is due to self-publishing. There are far more books being self-published than bookstores can absorb, the main reason why few self-published books are featured there. All writers, but particularly those who self-publish, are becoming more and more creative and working harder and harder to find ways to take their books to readers, since readers can't come to their books in bookstores 

Last year, for instance, I saw author Jo Ann Burgh at a porchfest. Many thanks to her. She promoted her appearance at a Facebook group I belong to, which brought me to the porchfest. Turns out, I love porchfests. Really, many thanks. I went back this year.

I am now a member of another Facebook group, Connecticut Authors and Their Readers Meeting Place, where I see authors posting about appearances at bars, vineyards, and breweries, among other places. These are often group appearances, meaning someone has not only approached these places about bringing their books in, but done some administrative work so a number of authors could come in. One Connecticut author who posts there and has had quite a bit of attention for her first book and has written a second says the bulk of her sales are made through these kinds of appearances.

These people, like Peggy Schaedler, are spending enormous amounts of time on marketing in a very real boots on the ground way.  Best wishes to all of them. But as I told Peggy today when I met her at Pumpkintown, I just don't want to work this hard. Yes, I am a little bit ashamed. But not enough to make the effort she and all these people are making. 

Friday Done List

Next week won't be as productive as this week, but Zen tells me not to think about that. Stay in this week...just as long as I can. In fact, this is being posted on Saturday. That's how long I stayed in this week.

Goal 1. Adult Short Stories, Essays, and Humor

• Dinner at Shirley Farr's House was published at The Memoirist, I think on Tuesday evening.
• I received a rejection on a humor piece.
• I resubmitted the humor piece elsewhere.
• I worked with the editor of the humor site, and the new piece will be accepted as soon as I resubmit it with changes.
• I registered for a OCWW workshop, but went biking yesterday instead of Zooming the workshop. I have the link to the recording and a week to use it.

Goal 3. Community Building, Marketing, and Branding

• Promoted Dinner at Shirley Farr's House.
• Did a blog post about Dinner at Shirley Farr's House. Will try to promote that this evening.
• Got an idea from another Medium writer relating to creating pinned Medium posts of boosted articles. So I did that.
• Saw another Medium writer suggest creating indexes of Medium work and pinning them to our Medium home page. So I'm working on that.

Another Story Behind A Story

Farr House as it still looked when I ate dinner there.

The Memoirist, a Medium publication that is new to me, just published my memoir Eating at Shirley
Farr's House in which I write about very much enjoying a restaurant in a mansion I later learned was once owned by someone who might not have been happy about me being there.

Once again, there is an interesting story beyond the story in the story.

In the Beginning

This memoir began as an essay for the one graduate course I took more than twenty years ago, an essay writing course at the University of Connecticut taught by Sam Pickering. Now, Pickering is the author of a few books of essays, but you can't find much about him on-line. Given the little I know of him from that class, I am not surprised. He did not seem to be an Internet-embracing kind of guy. At that point, none of the historical material was in the essay. The essay was about a local rube (me) who managed to get into a wealthy person's house by way of the restaurant someone had opened in it after her death, enjoy the place, and then it became even more of a wealthy person's place, ruining my bliss.

The History Involved

To make a long story short(er), the history involved in this story relates to the eugenics movement in the early twentieth century. There were eugenics fans all over the U.S, and the world, since some draw a line between American eugenics and the Nazis. You don't need to know much to think, Gee whiz, don't these things sound kind of similar? The Nazi connection may be why I never heard of eugenics while I was in high school or college, where I was a history minor. Even though I was in Vermont, which definitely was definitely up to its neck in eugenics. Who wants to have been involved with something with possible Holocaust connections?

What Does Eugenics Have to Do with Me Eating Sticky Buns in a Mansion Turned Restaurant?

Well, it turns out the Shirley Farr of My Dinner at Shirley Farr's was active in Vermont's eugenics movement. How active, you ask? Go ahead, ask. She funded what was known as the Vermont Eugenics Survey for eleven years. She spent between fifty and sixty thousand dollars on it back in the nineteen twenties and thirties when fifty to sixty thousand dollars was real money. 

This survey studied a number of generations of families someone had identified as having issues a society didn't want to encourage, issues eugenicists believed were genetic and could be stopped  immediately if these people weren't allowed to reproduce. A number of these families happened to be poor, happened to be Abenakis, or happened to be French Canadian. 

Because, you know, nothing goes wrong in white anglo saxon Protestant families. Absolutely nothing.

Now, I didn't learn anything about the eugenics movement and Shirley Farr until I decided to look her up on-line either while I was writing the original essay or thereafter. And even then, it took a while for me, a second-generation American on my father's French-Canadian side to go, "Wait. Gail. Isn't it odd you were eating dinner in that woman's house? And you took your kids there?"

Still More to the Story!!!

So that was going on in my head, off and on, over the last twenty years. But I did nothing with it because I had books to write that wouldn't sell and humor writing to get started on.

Then earlier this year I decided to start cleaning my massive professional files. My plan was to save anything I thought I could still do something with and toss the rest. I didn't get far, because I found some undergraduate writing that I used for a humor piece and this graduate material about Shirley Farr.

And the rest was doing research to get specific info on Farr, revising to create a little bit of a braided format, and finding an appropriate illustration.

Now I'm done.

The University of Vermont has a great deal of information about the eugenics movement in Vermont. A great deal. So much. 

  

Time Management Tuesday: Procrastibaking Is A Thing And Can Illustrate Attractive Aspects Of Procrastination

I'd seen the term procrastibaking a few times over the last couple of years but just thought it was a joke. Until a week ago Sunday. It sure looks real to me, and I also think it illustrates the four differences between procrastivity/productive procrastination and more demanding tasks described by J. Russell Ramsay in Why the ADHD Brain Chooses the Less Important Task--And How CBT Improves Prioritization Skills in ADDitude.

First Off, Procrastibaking

Articles on procrastibaking, like The Joys of 'Procrastibaking' to Avoid Real Work by Christina Ianzinto at AARP tend to treat it benignly. The AARP article was about a new cookbook, so, yeah, I can see that. In this case, procrastibaking is portrayed as a stress reliever. While Why Work When You Can Procrastinate by Julia Moskin at WRAL News includes some material from psychology professor Tim Pychyl on how procrastination, itself, is "one of the few situations in which people consistently make choices that are demonstrably bad, " over all the tone for procrastibaking is cheery.

Since I've mentioned Tim Pychyl's name, I'm just going to remind everyone that in his book The Procrastinator's Digest A Concise Guide to Solving the Procrastination Puzzle, he says that procrastination has a specific definition within psychology. True procrastination "is the voluntary delay of an intended action despite the knowledge that this delay may harm the individual in terms of the task performance or even just how the individual feels about the task or him or herself. Procrastination is a needless voluntary delay."

So I guess procrastibaking is that with brownies.

My Personal Procrastibaking Case Study

What was supposed to happen on Sunday, October 6:

I had two tasks planned that would improve my upcoming work week.

•  I was going to fold and take care of my clean clothes in the laundry room. I was going to do some of the ironing that has been waiting down there since last winter. We're talking only my clothes. Over the last few years, I've turned into that person who lives out of the clean clothes hamper, which is odd because I wasn't that person when I was washing, drying, folding, and taking care of laundry for four people. But that's neither here nor there. I was going to get my clean clothes dealt with so I wouldn't have to spend time dealing with it on days when I wanted to work.
• I was also going to do some research to support a minor part of an essay I've been rewriting. That would make the writing of that essay during the week go so much faster, because not only would the research be done, it would have been simmering in my brain for a while, which is always a good thing.

What really happened on Sunday, October 6:

I realized I had ten eggs that were going to expire on Monday, October 7. Even though I knew I could be loosie-goosie with expiration dates for eggs, I spent the afternoon of Sunday, October 6 baking

• rosemary sea salt bread
• drop biscuits
• and hermit bars

I bake gluten free, and gluten free baking sucks up eggs. I had only three left at the end of the day. I used them for lunch the next day, in case you're concerned. 

All the time I was doing this, I knew I was proving the point Ramsay makes in his ADDitude article, but I did it anyway. Mainly for this blog post. But still.

What Does My Procrastibaking Experience Illustrate?

J. Russell Ramsay says there are four differences between the small, unimportant tasks ADHD brains (and I'm going to argue other brains, too) select over more critical ones they put off. I ticked every one of them off with my work choice that Sunday.

1. Manual focus, meaning the tasks selected are often physical rather than mentally demanding. Certainly, baking was less mentally demanding than research. There's a lot of material on what I was writing about, and I don't find it terribly well organized. I was not running toward that task with open arms. 
2. Familiar script, meaning something you've done before and will find easier to do. I have been baking for a looong time. Additionally, two of the three things I made I've made a number of times. Sure, I know how to fold and iron clothes. But obviously I don't do it anywhere near as often.
3. Time frame, meaning a definite and predictable time frame. Recipes are all about time. How long was it going to take me to iron those clothes and find the little bit I needed in that research? I didn't know. 
4. Task progress, meaning a clear beginning, middle, and end. Again, what clearer beginning, middle, and end can you ask for than a recipe? I didn't expect to finish the ironing, even if I'd started it. Also, in this particular case I had the end date with the eggs expiring the next day. It was not at all difficult to convince myself that I was working on a deadline.

What Can We Take From All This?

For one thing, beware of procrastibaking! It is not benign and cheerful! If you're truly procrastibaking, it means you're not doing something more important. What is it and how are you going to address it?

For another, when you see yourself choosing to do something that doesn't address an important task waiting for you, ask yourself if you're choosing the lesser "work" because it's less mentally demanding, familiar, has a predictable time frame, and has a definite beginning, middle, and end.  A positive answer to any of those could convince you to take another course of action.

If you're wondering if I ever took care of the clothes and did the research I needed to do, the answer is no to the clothes and yes to the research. I could have taken a few minutes this past Sunday to do some work in the laundry room, but now I have a lot of apples to use up. I made an apple upside down cake instead. 

The Weekend Writer: How NOT To Personalize A Query Letter

There are countless numbers of articles out in the world on how to do countless numbers of things related to writing. Personally, I have become selective about which ones I read, because there really aren't countless numbers of ways to do things. But How Not To Personalize A Query Letter by Tiffany Hawk did catch my eye because of the NOT in the title.

Essentially what she's saying is don't personalize your letter in an illogical way that's not connected to a professional connection. For instance, sometime in the last year or two I submitted to an agent who has an apple orchard. It was all I could do not to say in my cover letter that I love apple orchards. I hope I didn't say that.

Also, don't do any of these things.

Hawk also has a 6-step strategy for finding literary agents that I think is very good. 

Friday Done List

This was probably my most normal work week in quite some time. I'm feeling both stimulated, because work stimulates work in my experience, and overwhelmed by all the stimulation.

Goal 1. Adult Short Stories, Essays, and Humor

• I received a humor rejection on October 3rd, spent time this week on an extensive revision, and submitted it elsewhere this morning.
• I wrote the new material for an essay revision.
• I finally went through Off Campus Writers' Workshop's offerings for the year to decide what I want to take. I'm not done yet, because I like to check out the workshop leaders. There are a lot of workshops I'm interested in and that helps screen. I often struggle reading very academic writers' and some literary writers' work. My theory is that I probably will struggle with workshops they run, too, so if I have to cut down on workshops, that's a place to start.
• This morning I heard about a flash fiction contest and considered entering it for a while. The entrance fee is larger than I usually like to pay, since contests with entrance fees are really gambling, right? But I made more money this month on Medium than I expected to, and I could submit two pieces of flash, which I just happened to have. But then while looking at files, I realized that I had submitted one of them somewhere else several months ago and haven't heard back yet so that story isn't eligible and did I want to submit just one story for that price? And I spent too much time on that this morning.
• Spent a little time making sure I'm up-to-date documenting what I've sent where. If you read the preceding bulleted point, you know why.
• Decided I need to create a reading schedule. Don't know when that will happen.

Goal 3. Community Building, Marketing, and Branding

• Did a Time Management Tuesday post this week and have plans for several more.
• Did a number of blog posts this week and have plans for several more.
• Promoted a couple of those blog posts.
• Hope to get some blog posts started this weekend
• Finished up still another website update with Computer Guy.

Some Annotated Reading October 10

Books (From my Kindle app) 

System Collapse by Martha Wells. The seventh in the Murderbot series. I love Murderbot. I must say it was off its game in this book. By that I do not mean there was something wrong with the writing. No, I mean Murderbot was struggling. If I had read this closer to the sixth book that probably would have been more meaningful for me. But Murderbot is Murderbot. It is meaningful just as it is. 

Skinny by Donna Cooner. This is very much a YA Cinderella tale about Ever (happily ever after) Davis, a high school sophomore who weighs 302 pounds at the beginning of our story. Her father is alive, unlike Cinderella's, her stepmother is a lovely person, she has a stepsister who wants to be her friend, a male friend named Rat (don't mice figure into the Cinderella story?), and a couple of fairy godmother figures. One of them is a very disturbing inner voice Ever has named Skinny. I wonder if Skinny was unhealthily disturbing. I found this book far more readable than some other books about teens with weight issues. The fairy tale connection made it less of a traditional problem story. Things turn out very well for Ever, as they should, since this is a fairy tale. However, they turn out very well for her because she loses weight, gets a makeover, and buys expensive clothes. When she conforms to society's teen girl norm, all good things come her way. Also, I question whether she could have dealt with Skinny on her own, without professional help. Nonetheless, this was an engaging read that didn't drag. 

Short Form

The Art of Taking It Slow by Anna Wiener in The New Yorker. Sadly these slow biking people are nowhere near slow enough for me.

The Unrivaled Omnipresence of Queen Elizabeth II by Rebecca Mead in The New Yorker. I enjoy reading about royal families, because their lives are like living novels. Maybe they are reality shows. I don't know, because I don't watch those. Rebecca Mead wrote My Life in Middlemarch, which is on my iPad. I have some interest in Middlemarch.

Humor (Yes, I did read a lot of humor this week)

My Cold is Worse Than Yours, I Can Tell by Sarah James at Slackjaw. This is fantastic. Why isn't it getting thousands of claps? 

Just Because I'm A Death Doula, Doesn't Mean I... by Catherine Durkin Robinson at The Haven. For a humor list to work, it needs a really distinctive hook. Which this humor list has.

I Tried Turning Thirty So You Don't Have To (Honest Review) by Meghana Indurti at The New Yorker. Haven't you seen these titles? "I Did _________ So You Don't Have To?" "My Honest Review?" Sure, it is.  

I Only Offered To Do The Dishes At This Dinner Party So I Could Keep Eating by Chason Gordon at McSweeney's Internet Tendency  Nobody offers to do dishes at a dinner party. Nobody.

My Friend Can Be A Bit Much But He's A Good Guy If You Give Him A Chance by Ashton Winters at McSweeney's Internet Tendency  No, he's not. And that's what makes this funny. Incongruity.

It's Crazy To Think Everyone (Except Me) Is Going To Die Someday by Graeme Carey at Slackjaw Again, why isn't this thing getting thousands of claps at Slackjaw? Is it the word "death" in the title? Because the "death" doula humor piece should get more attention, too. I once used the word "die" in a title on the Medium platform, and, no, that didn't go over well at all. We need to all work on this.

I Am A Lady, And Donald Trump Is My Protector by Devorah Blachor at McSweeney's Internet Tendency. More incongruity humor.

Oh, Yeah. I Had a New Humor Piece Published Two Weeks Ago

Photo by Torsten Dettlaf on Pexels

Here I am, finally promoting Subject Lines I Love to See on My Emails, which was published at Muddy'Um two weeks ago. 

Now, you may ask, what exactly went into writing this, Gail? Isn't it pretty much just a collection of email subject lines that turned up in your inbox? Yes. Except I had to come up with a response to them. And I had to organize them in such a way as to create callbacks, which are a thing in humor writing and which I enjoy as a humor reader. And I had to make the last piece the funniest.

So I did have to do something.

Time Management Tuesday: Reading About ADHD Has Made Me Rethink Productive Procrastination

I haven't been doing much with Time Management Tuesday the last couple of years for two reasons.

1. I see a lot of time management articles on Medium that are clearly written with minimal research and are often rehashes of material others have covered. Not much that's new there. It's a little bit book reportish. This left me with anxiety about producing the same kind of material, which I'd really rather not do.
2. I don't feel I've been doing that great with managing my own time the last few years. Am I being a hypocrite writing about managing time or am I writing about how I deal with a professional problem? I can feel a headache coming on. Seriously. 

But recently I've read a couple of things that caused what we might call an interest flair. I am inspired again! I think I have a few months of time management material here, beginning with ADHD-related material for October, which is ADHD Awareness Month.

Can ADHD Behavioral Approaches Help Others Manage Time?

We recently had a family member diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. This was not a surprise, which I suspect is the case in many families. As a result, I am attracted to ADHD articles and definitely noticed the #ADHDawarenessmonth hashtag on Xitter. That led to one thing and another and some reading on ADHD and productivity and time management. Some of which sounded as if it could be helpful for any of us.

First off, the National Institute of Mental Health defines attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder as a "developmental disorder marked by persistent symptoms of inattention and/or hyperactivity and impulsivity that interfere with functioning or development."  The inattention part is of particular interest to writers, because it involves problems "staying on task, paying attention, or being organized."

Staying on task and being organized are hugely important for writers, because of the incredible, some of us might say overwhelming, array of things we need to do to write something, get it published, and market it. Each one of those aspects of the job require a large number of tasks. On top of that, the majority of us are working other jobs and possibly acting as caregivers for family members. So many balls to juggle. So many possible distractions.

How to decide what to do?

Procrastivity

In Why the ADHD Brain Chooses the Less Important Task--And How CBT Improves Prioritization Skills in ADDitude J. Russell Ramsay describes what he calls "procrastivity" in which people with ADHD procrastinate by working, but working at lower-priority activities. So they are doing things, but not making progress on a more important task. 

Productive Procrastination

When I read about procrastivity, I immediately thought of productive procrastination, something I've written about here a few times. I thought it was such a fine idea I republished the original post in 2022. My favorite willpower guru, Kelly McGonigal (She has a new book out! Or, at least, one I haven't heard of!) used the term "productive procrastination" in a Life Hacker piece on how she works and said, "I may have built my career on web searches I've done when I should have been doing something else." In another Life Hacker interview Ira Glass said, "I procrastinate by working." Though he did describe working at low-priority tasks when he should be writing as a bad habit. He wasn't as positive about it as McGonigal was.  

I've been feeling good about productive procrastination, believing that all those things I did while I should have been working on that last book for four years were a good thing. I was doing something. Anything. Now, after Ramsay's description of what goes on when someone with ADHD ends up in less necessary activities, I'm wondering about what I've been doing. 

Oh, and look. A far more recent Life Hack article, Productive Procrastination: Is It Good Or Bad? by Leon Ho, comes down firmly on the bad side. 

What To Do?

The Leon Ho Life Hack article includes time management techniques to avoid productive procrastination. But the J. Russell Ramsay ADDitude article has some fascinating stuff on why the ADHD mind leans toward low-priority tasks over the high-priority ones that could actually be more helpful for them to do. For instance, red flags for any of us might be noticing that we're spending a lot of time on tasks that are less demanding, more familiar, shorter, and with a very clear beginning and end rather than a big job that's waiting for us. Like writing a book. 

What I'm Going To Do

For the rest of October, I'm going to be looking for ADHD connected material that relates to time management and productivity, in recognition of ADHD Awareness Month. Next week I'll have a personal case study in how I spent an afternoon that illustrates some of what Ramsay talks about in his ADDitude article.

I think I should also give some thought to why I embraced productive procrastination in such a big way. Someone I liked did it? It gave me an excuse to get away from harder work? Yeah, I think that's it. Don't need to think about that any longer.

Also, I'm correct. As I said in the beginning of this post, I should be anxious about jumping into writing lightly researched blog posts.

Friday Done List

The big thing I'm done with is travel and celebrating. Yes, vacationing always provides me with some creative ideas, but they get buried under the work involved to get ready to go somewhere and clean up afterward and the work piling up at home.

Don't you just love First World Problems? I know I do. They're the best possible kind.

I did manage to squeeze a little work in over the last few weeks. Oh! And you know what else! I met my Goodreads reading goal for the year. 

Goal 1. Adult Short Stories, Essays, and Humor

• I had another humor piece published last week, though you'd never know it here, because I didn't get around to doing a post about it. Next week.
• I dug around in old emails and discovered I'd received a rejection I didn't know about a while back.
• Got another rejection a few days ago.
• Started revising that last rejection, because the next place I want to submit to wants fewer words.
• Continued work on an eating-ish memoir piece, which is actually a revision of something I wrote twenty years ago. It's going to have a twist now.

Goal 2. Submit 143 Canterbury Road to agents. (Has turned into submitting any book length work to anyone.)

• I spent a few days making a synopsis for a book I haven't submitted anywhere in years so I could submit it to an agent open to SCBWI writers during the month of September.
• Made the above submission. Yes! I am calling this doing two things. 

Goal 3. Community Building/Marketing/Branding

• Added a number of newly published pieces to the website earlier this summer, which I may or may not have mentioned.
• Added another newly published piece to the website today, so that we're not dealing with so many changes at once. Also updated my bio and took out some dead links.
• Read a couple of things that have inspired me to get Time Management Tuesday going again, at least for the next month or so.
• Wrote next Tuesday's Time Management Tuesday post.

Some Annotated Reading October 3

I have just finished a week of birthday observances, all for the same person. Me. That, on top of the two weeks of vacation less than a month ago has left me reeling over all the minor life and work details I need to address. Overwhelmed.

I did keep reading though. I can always keep reading.

Books

I finished a couple more nineteenth century historical mysteries, both in the same series, which is going down hill as series often do.

I've read some more of Best Travel Writing of 2018. That book is so long.

Short Form

Emily is the Quintessential Privileged White American Girl by Martine Nyx in Cinemania. I started watching this show after it had been out for a season or so for the French with English subtitles. I'd already finished Dix Pour Cent (there is no comparison) and hadn't discovered Lupin. Yes, you do have to wonder, What is the attraction with this show? Even if you don't hate it, as many people do, what is there, really, to even hold your attention?

When Good Artists Do Bad Things by Citizen Reader at Books Are Our Superpower. I don’t know that there is ever going to be a way of dealing with the issue of good artists being bad people.

An Impresario of the Landscape by Stephen Heyman at Lapham's Quarterly. This is an introduction to Louis Bromfield, whose home, Malabar Farm, I visited on vacation. It focuses mainly on him as a conservationist. I have so many thoughts about this guy.

This is Why So Many Bars, Restaurants and Coffee Shops Look the Same Across the World by Charlie Brown at Rooted.  It's because social media has flattened taste. I wonder if other types of media do it, too. But the whole concept of "flattening taste" was new to me. 

Humor

Blurbs Beyond Books by Adam Bertocci at Points in Case. This is a fantastic piece for those of us who really dislike blurbs.

I Thought I Would Have Accomplished A Lot More Today And Also By The Time I Was Thirty-five by Alex Baia at The New Yorker. This is hysterical. I started laughing out loud when I got to "Shit. I'm actually forty-one." And then I felt guilty for having laughed at this suffering narrator. And then I laughed some more.

Humor and pain I’m So Lucky I’m an Adult So I Can Do Whatever I Want by Lisa Hides at Frazzled.

"What About the Cat?" Feedback From an Online Writing Workshop by Helen Raica-Klotz at Brevity Blog.  How funny you find this will be determined by how many writers' workshops/critique groups you've been part of.

Friday Done List

It took the better part of three days to get my mind settled after vacation. I need a Friday Done List to make me feel I didn't spend most of the week recovering.

Goal 1. Adult Short Stories, Essays, and Humor

• I returned home to find a short story rejection. But the publication offered me a discount on a subscription! I had already subscribed for a couple of months. I like the material there, but it's just so difficult to find time to read everything I want to read.
• Worked on a humor piece I started before I left town.
• Submitted said humor piece. This particular publication uses an AI for initial copyediting, and I've already heard from it with a complaint about my using the wrong font on a subheading that no other publication has ever objected to. I've already dealt with it. Whoops. Now the AI wants me to cut 70 words. Yes, humor should be short. But it is a freaking AI telling me this.
• When I'm traveling, I email myself ideas that I then have to enter into my digital writer's journal. I believe I've finished that. 

Goal 3. Community Building/Marketing/Branding

• Did two blog posts, including this one.
• Promoted the first blog post.

Some Annotated Reading September 19

Why, yes, I am back from a two-week vacation and overwhelmed by the seemingly thousands of minute details of my daily personal and work life. But I've done some reading!

Books

Art History 101 by John Finlay. This was a Christmas gift from a family member. Masses of interesting stuff that I can't really recall now.

A Lady's Guide to Mischief and Murder by Dianne Freeman. This is part of one of those romance/historical mystery series. The romance here is less intense than some series, but the mystery is strong, particularly in this one.

Today Will Be Different by Maria Semple. Maria Semple is the author of Where'd You Go, Bernadette, which I enjoyed, though I couldn't tell you now where Bernadette went or who was looking for her. Today Will Be Different is another missing person story, also a good read. It was more of what I think of as an experience book, meaning you enjoy the experience of reading it and don't worry a lot about what is happening. Though what is happening here is more clear cut than I recall Bernadette being.

Short Form

I read a number of the essays in Best American Travel Writing 2018, edited by Cheryl Strayed. I have so many more left to read. Travel writing is not just those things we used to see in the travel section of the Sunday paper. Back when the Sunday paper had a travel section. Back when we read the Sunday paper.

In related news, I read Women's Travel Writing by Patricia M. E. Lorcin at World History Sources. What was interesting here was the idea of using travel writing to teach history.

I Love Little Free Libraries, But Do They Really Benefit the Community? by Kathleen Curtin Do at Books Are Our Superpower. This is an excellent essay, beginning with the personal and moving on to the greater world, which is my understanding of what a good personal essay should do. 

Exclusive: Doug Emhoff Makes a Pre-debate Pitstop at my Boyfriend's Philadelphia Record Store by Amanda Marcotte at Salon. What I like about this is the idea of politicians having interests. Almost any interests.

Keeping Up With the Joneses by Andrew Jazprose Hill at Counter Arts. James Earl Jones' father was an actor, too! Very interesting early life.

Did I mention the NaNoWriMo series of messes before I went on vacation? In case I didn't, here you go.  NaNoWriMo 2024 AI Controversy Explained by Klein Felt at The Direct.

Two Shakespeareans Take Stock at The Millions Well, to be truthful, I like Judi Dench, who is one of the two Shakespeareans here, not Shakespeare.

Humor

Coming back from vacation is a temporal landmark, a time to start anew. Assuming you aren't overwhelmed with stuff to get back to. Nonetheless, I am trying to establish both a daily yoga practice and daily Medium reading. 

I'm the Parent of the Class Troublemaker. How About a Play Date? by Caroline Horwitz at Frazzled. Hey, troublemakers need play dates, too.

Cuckqueans and Cackles: Scrabble With James Joyce by Walter Browne at MuddyUm. I don't even like James Joyce or Scrabble, and I enjoyed this. 

The Eco-Green Yoga Mat Guide To Navigating Our Sliding Scale Payment System by Jordan de Padova at Slackjaw. I like yoga and meditation humor. 

Labor Day Appears To Be The Ultimate Temporal Landmark

People are going nuts on my Facebook page about today being the last day of summer. Last week a seven-year-old relative told me he and his family were going to the beach this weekend, "the last weekend of summer." 

Talk about a temporal landmark! A temporal landmark being, of course, a calendar event that marks the passage of time and suggests an opportunity for a fresh start. Summer, as the little person in my family pointed out, is over, and it's time to start something new. Fall. The school year. Professional activities that had been on hold, because the temporal landmark of the beginning of summer triggers a time to do a lot less. At least for Americans.

I managed to have four humor pieces published this summer, one of which was selected for Medium's boosted program and did quite well for me. But, otherwise, the summer was difficult professionally. For many years that would have been because we had a sick, elderly relative. This year it was because everyone was well. A couple of us celebrated a birthday for a week. We hosted two family gatherings, which required a few days of preparation each. We had houseguests twice. We're heading off for a multi-week trip, which for us means a multi-week prep period. 

Zen tells me to appreciate those four publications, two of which were completely written this summer, and let go of my attachment to all the ideas I've had and couldn't follow through with because of fun and games. 

To be fair, during my vacation prep time I've been collecting work reading to do while I'm away and planning which writing projects I'll continue with first when I'm back at my laptop. In Gail World, that counts as writing, too.

But not as much writing as I hope to do in October. See you later.
 

The Weekend Writer: How Many Publishing Worlds Are You Familiar With?

 A few weeks ago, I saw an article on Medium that I will never find again, because of the hundreds of thousands of things published there. I think the writer was a woman, so for convenience's sake I will refer to her as she. The writer was distressed because she had to wait two days to hear back from editors when she submitted to publications on the Medium platform. She had a schedule to maintain! What was wrong with these people? It is a problem! I think she may have also expected these editors to automatically accept her work, but I may be mistaken.

All her commenters agreed with her.

I sat there in front of my laptop, stunned. 

I often see articles on Medium about writing on Medium and what is wrong with Medium and why the writers are thinking of leaving Medium or why the writers are leaving Medium. You don't have to read these things for very long to realize that most of these people have never written anything for publication before they started publishing on Medium. Because Medium is a self-publishing platform, anyone can publish there immediately, without meeting any objective writing standards, without having any expertise in subjects they write about. (Medium does require a certain format for published articles and really prefers that writers not steal the images they use for illustrations. Does anyone else think that seems reasonable? That's not a high bar, folks.)

Is Medium The Real Writing World?

When I read these kinds of things on Medium, I think those writers have no idea what's going on in the real writing world. But why isn't Medium real? Many of the writers publishing there appear to have never published anywhere else. The site encourages community, so many Medium people are reading there, following other writers, and supporting each other with applause and comments. If they can achieve what they want to achieve there, they may never go out to traditional publications for anything at all. They are in a world. What's not real about it?

Back in 2010, there was talk on the Internet about there being two publishing worlds. One was centered in New York and involved publishing as a means of generating income for writers. The other was centered around MFA programs and involved publishing as a means of supporting academic positions--a variation on publish-or-perish. If someone were writing on this subject today, I believe self-publishing would be a third publishing world and perhaps self-publishing on-line at platforms like Medium and Substack a fourth. 

The Publishing World That Is Not Medium

A couple of days ago, Jane Friedman published a piece by Amy L. Bernstein (who, by the way, is on Substack)  called Publishing Advice from a Serial Submitter to Literary Magazines. This is a description of the traditional writing and publishing world I'm familiar with, the publishing world where you are not automatically published. "Indeed," Bernstein says, "the 1% acceptance rule is fairly consistent, whether you're submitting short fiction or a novel."

Even though I wasn't aware that only 1% of submissions are accepted by literary magazines, my expectations of an acceptance are not high. And, no, I never expect to hear back from a traditional editor in two days. But the publishing world Bernstein is talking about is one that I am at least familiar with. I stick with it, because I understand that, as she says, "If you don't play, you can't win."

But I know about the traditional publishing world, because I've been writing, submitting, and sometimes being published for a long time. Most of the people coming up writing in Medium world have not. Will they ever know anything else besides sending off whatever they write with an expectation of it being published, as is, immediately? 

Does it matter if they don't?

Some Annotated Reading August 29

Books

A Lady's Guide to Etiquette and Murder by Dianne Freeman is the beginning of what for me is a new nineteenth century mystery with couple detectives series. There must be a term for these books, but I don't know it. Lady's Guide has a decent mystery, though I thought the ending was just a little bit abrupt, and there is little of the cliched mannerisms that many of these books have--the rolling of eyes, the carrying on about the scent coming in from outdoors, the arguing between the future lovers. I'm now reading book two.

Book Lovers by Emily Henry. This author was recommended for her dialogue by a workshop leader a few months ago. Her dialogue is great. And this particular book is good for a reader like me who isn't into traditional romance and whose knowledge of it is primarily from movies, because a family member is a fan. Book Lovers has a metafiction thing going on, with the main character recognizing the cliches of the romance genre and assigning roles to the people around her. She, herself, is the evil city woman girlfriend in romances. Loved that. In spite of this, there was a lot of romance stuff going on that romance readers should like. I particularly liked how much the main character loved New York City, because the city is usually bad and country good in these kinds of stories. Henry is a good author to know about.

Short Stories

The Books of Losing You by Junot Diaz at The New Yorker. My first time reading Junot Diaz. I got the New Yorker subscription to read their on-line humor. That doesn't interest me much. It's exposing me to a wider variety of fiction writers, though. So huzzah for that.

The Closer You Were, The Less You Knew by Annie Dawid at Sequesterum. Right now Sequesterum may be my favorite literary journal. You have to subscribe to read entire short stories, but you can do so for just a few months, which seems very outside the box to me. Sometimes I find literary journals...difficult...beyond me. The things I've read at Sequesterum are sophisticated stories I can understand. The Closer You Were, The Less You Knew deals with a family experiencing tragedy on 9/11/2001. But they've been experiencing tragedy for decades, even generations. It was something I never thought of before. Tragedy is all over extended families, even if it's not tragedy on a 9/11 magnitude. In this story, it comes on top of everything else.

Short Form

A Fishing Book From 1594 is Still One of the Most Sought-After by Nature Lovers by Lance R. Fletcher in A Boy and His Dog: Outdoor Americana As a general rule, I prefer reading about very old pieces of literature rather than reading the pieces of literature themselves. 

A Life of Neurodivergence: What We Thought About Paris Hilton Was All Wrong at LinkedIn? Not sure who wrote this or how I got to something at LinkedIn. It turns out that Paris Hilton has ADHD and writes about it in her 2023 memoir. We deal with ADHD in our family. I read about that.

How I Shifted From Pure Writing To Documenting Instead by Brendan Charles at The Writing Cooperative. Charles explains that he became more successful on Medium when he stopped writing "how to" articles and began writing "how I" articles. I think this relates to something I've seen going on on Medium all the time I've been there. Many people write and publish articles on things they don't actually know much about. In terms of writing about writing, I agree with Charles that most things I see on the subject on Medium have been done before. The articles appear to be researched, not the work of experienced writers discussing a craft they have experience with and knowledge of. In fact, I can recall reading a "how to/how I" Medium article once by someone who explained how many minutes he spent on-line researching a subject and then how many minutes he spent writing the article. The impression left was that his readers could do that with their writing, too. But writing about something you don't truly know about doesn't make for compelling reading.

Humor

I Miss the Good Old Days When You Could Go to a Website and Read It by Alex Baia at Slackjaw  What's funny about this is that the 'good old days' aren't all that old. Except for the readers who think they are.

I'm a Regular Guy Who's Sick of Being Villainized for My Secret Second Family by Caroline Horwitz in Frazzled. We're not supposed to feel a guy with a second family is being victimized. And guess what? We don't! 

The Weekend Writer: Some Virtual Writing Workshop Opportunities

You know how much I enjoy attending writing workshops by way of Zoom. Thurber House in Columbus, Ohio has announced its fall adult writing workshops, and, yes, you can attend them virtually. 

Why, yes, I have been to Thurber House. 

Why, yes, I have written about going to Thurber House.

Why, yes, I do have a Pinterest board about Thurber House.

Some Annotated Reading August 22

 Books

I read Early Autumn by Louis Bromfield, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1927, because I'm going to be visiting his home this fall. I have many thoughts about this book, which I may put into an essay. I will say that this thing leans heavily into telling instead of showing. Very, very heavily.

Short Stories

Chablis by Donald Barthelme in The New Yorker. I think this is the first thing by Donald Barthelme that I've read. I found it enjoyable, but I can't say I got it. I'm reading a book about art history, and I'm wondering now how necessary it is to get things.

My Poet Laureate Project

I keep forgetting that I'm reading poetry by all the poet laureates. Or, as they were called in the early days, consultants in poetry. I tried reading a few things by Robert Lowell, Consultant in Poetry in 1947 to 1948. I know he's a big-name writer. I didn't have a lot of time this past week, and his poems I sampled did not quickly grab me. I do admire Skunk Hour a bit, because it includes the name "L.L. Bean." 

Short Form Reading

The Radical Woman Behind Good-night Moon by  Anna Holmes in The New Yorker. I love reading about Margaret Wise Brown. Love it. So much great stuff in this article, which you won't be able to read, because it requires a subscription. Like the short story above

Nor will you be able to read Wendy Wasserstein's The Baby Who Arrived Too Soon, because it's also in The New Yorker. Published in 2000. Now, of course I know Wendy Wasserstein's name, because I don't live in a cave. But I've never seen any of her plays or, I believe, read anything she wrote. I don't love reading preemie stories, the way I love reading Margaret Wise Brown stories, but it's difficult for me to pass by one, especially if it appears to have a happy ending, which Wendy's does. I call her Wendy, because I, too, am a preemie mom. We sort of have a club. So I read Wendy's wonderful story, then I headed out to Google to see how things are going with her and Lucy. And I found that Wendy died in 2006. And you know what? I knew that. I read about it when it happened, because I don't live in a cave. But I didn't know we were both preemie moms then. Now I do.

Here's something you should be able to read: Helga Estby's Long, Long Walk Was Almost Lost to History by Shawn Vestal in The Spokesman Review. I stumbled upon Helga Estby's name, because I'm into the nineteenth century, particularly the 1890s. Also women.

I've heard of flaneurs before, but they came up again in that art history book I mentioned earlier. That led me to reading A Flaneur's Guide to Walking with Intention by Caleigh Alleyne in EnRoute. It's an interview with Erika Wilson who wrote a book about walking in the flaneurish way. I walk. I expect to be walking an extra amount next month. 

The Trad Wife Is a Myth--Historically, She Never Existed by Maria Cassano at The Virago. This confirms everything I think about this subject. 

Time Management Tuesday: Go Ahead And Shift Your Focus. You Can Do That. Also, I Wrote Some Introverted Humor.

 You Are an Introverted Parent was published last week at Frazzled. The piece was selected for  Medium's boosted program, which means I got additional marketing there and reached a higher audience. I am happy with the results in readership.

You Are an Introverted Parent is my seventh published piece of writing this year, equaling last year's publications and one less than the year before. I've published 35 pieces of various types of writing on Medium since I got with the program. That was about 4 years ago. Does 35 published pieces of work in 4 years seem like a lot to you? It seems like a lot to me. I'm afraid it seems like a great deal to my Facebook friends who have to endure all my announcements there whenever I publish something new.

How Much Time Does It Take To Write These Things, Anyway?

Here's the thing. A woman who started writing at Medium in January of this year sometimes publishes 20 articles a month there at various publications. Additionally, she started her own publication. She sometimes publishes several times a week or even more than once a day. Yes, when you're writing at that kind of speed, quality is going to be very up and down. I don't read everything she writes.

Nonetheless, from things I've read at Medium, the way to collect  followers--people who are Medium members and are interested in your work--is to publish as she is publishing, by which I mean a lot. She's not the only writer there who publishes several times a week and more. The writer I'm talking about has gathered 2.7 thousand followers in eight months. I've gathered 470 in four years. 

Almost every time I've published something on Medium, I've attracted a few new followers. When I get boosted, I attract more than a few. So, yes, publishing is how you build readership there. If you're thinking in terms of time management in that particular situation, you need to manage your time so you can do that.

Shift Your Focus To Short Form Work, Gail

Now, over the last four years I was working on a book, so that took a lot of time that I wasn't using for other kinds of writing. I've also wasted a lot of time querying agents about my book-length work. Both those things are over for now, and I will be focusing my time specifically on short-form work. So, yes, I will be writing more of it. That's what time management will be about for me for the immediate future.

Not short-form work just for Medium, though. I have two short stories out for consideration at other places right now. I'm working on something I'm going to submit elsewhere, too. I'm not a rapid writer, anyway. I came up with the idea for You Are an Introverted Parent, came up with an angle/voice for it, wrote it, and submitted it in just under a week. That is the speed of light for me. Between that more methodical, orderly, and obsessed with detail mindset (someone else said that about me) and submitting some work to other places, I'm never going to be publishing even weekly at Medium, forget about doing any more than that.

Writing differently than other people who publish there is no reason not to publish there, too.

Shifting Your Writing Focus Is Still Using Your Time For Writing

I frequently...by which I mean often...see people posting on Xitter in absolute despair because they can't find an agent or publisher for their book-length manuscript. They are considering quitting writing, because at this point in time they can't publish one particular type of writing. It's as if they don't even consider any other kind of writing. The book is all. The book is the dream, and if they can't achieve their dream, they're done.

They don't think about shifting their focus.

Some Annotated Reading August 8

Lots going on the week before last, including house guests. Last week was recovery. If you've ever read about introverts needing recovery, believe it. I was overwhelmed just from little things I needed to do to get work and life back on track. Too overwhelmed to do an annotated reading post, which appears to be one of the few things I do here these days.

Books

The Witches Are Coming by Lindy West. I don't know how I found out about this, but it's terrific. I've read a number of books of essays by young women who are say, comedy people, and the essays are very memoirish things. From this book, it appears West is more of a witty social commentator. Her essays, even if they are personal essays, do what I believe personal essays are supposed to do...they move from the personal to the greater world. The meaning of "the witches are coming" title...wow. Lots of good stuff in this book. I'll be looking for more of her work. 

The Lemon by S. E. Boyd. I'm sure I came upon this one because it won this year's Thurber Prize. I had a little trouble getting into it, which was probably due to the point-of-view switches. They're always an issue for me. And I found the ending...not all that ending-like. But I suspect this book is more of a satire about celebrity than it is a story, and it was an enjoyable read between the beginning and the ending. 

About Humor

"One of the main inventors of the form": Bob Newhart's stand-up comedy mind unbuttoned" (I hate it when titles have no caps) by Melanie McFarland at Salon. McFarland quotes Marc Maron: "Newhart was part of a shift from rapid fire punchlines to methodical, contemplative comedy." This reminded me of my high school English teacher who said he didn't care for Bob Hope, because he just stood on a stage and told jokes. Probably the most significant thing I took away from my year with him.

Eating

An Ode To The Saltine Cracker by John DeVore at Medium. 1st. I don't actually know what good food writing is, but I enjoyed this very much. I don't eat saltines anymore, because I don't eat wheat, but one gluten free company makes something it calls "table crackers" that serves the purpose for me. This article left me feeling that perhaps crackers don't exist for soup, but that soup exists for crackers. 2nd. I just noticed that this article wasn't published at a Medium publication but directly by the author. Nonetheless, it did very well according to the number of claps and comments, which can be difficult to do without the help of a publication. Well, this author has nearly 140,000 followers. So he doesn't need a publication.  

Kamala Harris is reclaiming what it means to be a "woman in the kitchen" by Marin Scotten at Salon. I found this very interesting, because Harris has been in what you'd think would be a high-profile position for nearly four years and evidently has talked about cooking quite a bit. I am not a foodie by any means. Eating is more my interest, and while I had pretentions for cooking as an art years ago, I cook to sustain life now. Still, I do a little reading about cooking. In four years, the only thing I'd heard about Kamala Harris cooking was the story about her explaining how to cook a turkey while she was waiting for an interview to start. What's that about? Was the press not interested before the last two weeks, even though there are videos of her talking about cooking? Was I reading the wrong stuff? 

Humor

J.D. Vance's Least Favorite Movies and TV Shows by Caroline Horwitz at MuddyUm. I like repetition in humor, and I enjoyed the cat repetition here. 

I'd Like to Present an Argument Against Funeral Karaoke by Graham Techler at Points in Case. A very good example of incongruity humor.

After Playing Magic the Gathering with You, a Child, I Have Concluded That My Life is a Lie and I Probably Have Dementia by Dave Goldstein at Frazzled. Love the way the game leads the speaker to his life conclusions. Also, I've lived through Magic the Gathering and am now immersed in Pokemon. I'm going to point out that at Chez Gauthier those collectible card games are perceived as a guy thing. It's not that I, a woman, am intellectually too weak to play them. It's that I won't. 

More Humor For You

Priscilla du PreezCA on Unsplash

The humor piece I mentioned in my Friday Done post was published Friday night. Thank You for Reading Scripture During Our Church Service This Sunday was published at MuddyUm. MuddyUm is a new publication for me on the Medium platform.

This publication requires authors to include a "kicker," a sort of subject line above the title and subtitle. So that was new and quite easy to learn. Coming up with the subject line is probably more effort than technically creating it.

As usual, this humor piece has a back story. I did, indeed, have to read that passage at church and was quite...taken aback...by having to use the word "fornication" in church. Is it not a four-syllable word for a four-letter word? Ah, yeah, it is. But I got used to it. I'll probably just slip into a conversation one of these days, that's how cool I am with it.

Friday Done List

Interesting story: I did very little work last week (not to be confused with this week), because of family activities. I received three rejections that week, though, so I sort of was working while not doing much.

Goal 1. Adult Short Stories, Essays, and Humor

• Week of July 21 Received two rejections, one for a short story and one for a short humor piece. 
• Week of July 28 Resubmitted the humor piece and submitted another short story.
• The site I submitted the humor piece to uses an "Automated Inspector" for initial, pre-acceptance editing. Not easy to deal with and somehow the humor piece was dropped from consideration, and I had to resubmit it and get more comments from the AI. A learning curve that may help me in the future, or may be a waste of time. 
• Week of July 28 Worked on one humor piece and started another.

Goal 2. Submit 143 Canterbury Road to Agents (has turned into submitting any book length work to anyone)

• Week of July 21 Received rejection on Good Women
• Week of July 21 Took part in a new Xitter pitch event #smallpitch, pitches to small presses. Made 3 pitches for 2 books, for 6 pitches, overall. Which I count as 6 submissions and rejections. Got some interest from other writers, though, which was gratifying.

Goal 3. Community Building/Marketing/Branding

• Week of July 28 Tried to do an Annotated Reading post, but did a little work on the new humor piece in the morning and went hiking in the afternoon.