Archive | June, 2017

Get Ready for a Shock

27 Jun

My dad was into the DIY craze before it was a craze.  Most likely this was the end result from growing up during the Great Depression.  One learned, during that difficult time in our history, to take care of things on your own.  Carpentry, plumbing, electrical work, car repair, these were things my father knew nothing about, but he learned through dogged determination and need.

I remember, growing up, that we didn’t have the money for repairmen.  Dad worked hard . . . Mom worked hard . . . and all that hard work was for paying bills for necessities.  We rarely had extras . . . we rarely had disposable income . . . we weren’t poor but we certainly were not rolling in dough.

I remember one time in particular.  The upstairs bedroom lights wouldn’t turn on.  The switch worked fine, and there was no way my dad was going to call in an electrician to handle the job, so he tackled it on his own.  He took off the switch plate and started checking out wires to see if he could find the problem, and within thirty seconds he was knocked on his ass by an electrical shock.  I was there watching, and it was nothing less than frightening to see my 200 pound father knocked back from the wall, falling ass-over-teakettle.

He shook his head, rubbed his hands on his pants, stood up shakily and then resume working.  He eventually found the problem, spliced some wires, and we finally had lights again in that room.

I don’t mind telling you that incident scared the hell out of me, and to this day I won’t do electrical work, but a lesson was learned, and it is that lesson I pass on to you today.

Most of us writers do not have huge budgets for marketing.  Thank God for social media, or most of our work would never be heard of by the reading public.  The point being we have to just keep on keeping on.  We try marketing techniques, and if they don’t work we try other marketing techniques, and if those don’t work we keep trying.  We do not have the option to quit, and we do not have the resources to call in experts.

We keep on trying until we work it out!

What’s there to be afraid of?  The power is turned off on our particular job. There’s no chance we’ll get shocked!

Have a great week of writing, marketing, and living!

Bill

“Helping writers to spread their wings and fly.”

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Work Smarter

20 Jun

Some of you may know that I love the game of baseball.  It has a sentimental value for me because it was the game my father taught me, a game he and I spent many hours playing together.  Some of my earliest memories are of me at four and five years of age, waiting for dad to come home from work, so we could play ball across the street from our home on an empty lot.  He would hit ground balls to me, and fly balls, and he would patiently teach me how to properly field them all.

As I got older he worked with me on pitching, how to properly release the ball, how to throw a curveball, and a knuckleball, and eventually I became good enough to pitch on my high school team, and then for the college team until my shoulder was injured my junior year and I had to stop playing.

I remember one game in particular, back when I was about thirteen.  I could throw pretty hard for a thirteen year old, and most teams I could handle simply by throwing the ball past the opposing batters.  They simply could not catch up with my fastball.

Until one day in July we played the second place team, a team with a lot of talented batters, and it took them about two innings to zero in on my fastball, to get their timing fixed on it, and suddenly every pitch I threw was being hammered for a hit.  One run, two runs, three runs . . . finally I got out of that inning after giving up four runs, and I was one frustrated baseball player when I got to the dugout to sit down and rest.  It seemed the harder I threw, the harder the other team hit the ball . . . really just a matter of physics, but I was in no mood to discuss physics when that inning ended.

I was getting a drink of water when my dad met me at the water cooler.  He asked me, with that grin on his face I remember so well, how my day was progressing.  I was almost in tears when I told him that no matter how hard I threw, the other team was just killing my fastball, and I didn’t know what to do.  Dad said just two words to me and then walked back to the stands and sat down next to my mother.  He said “throw smarter!”  I knew exactly what he meant.  If they were hitting my fastball then I needed to throw smarter and start throwing my curveball and knuckleball.

We won that game 5-4 and I didn’t give up a hit the last five innings, and a valuable lesson had been learned.

It is that lesson I pass on to you today.  Work smarter!  Make a priority list.  Realize that you may not be able to do everything you want to do as a writer.  Hell, you may have to drop some of your goals, and concentrate on the big goals, or you may have to seek help to fix a problem you can’t seem to fix . . . work smarter!

I hope you all have a fantastic week of writing . . . and living!  Remember how gifted you are.  Remember that probably one percent of the population can do what you do as well as you do it…one percent!

You are extraordinary!

Bill

“Helping writers to spread their wings and fly.”

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The Death of a Chicken

13 Jun

We had a chicken die last week.  One of our original six, she was with us for four years and one day she just got sick and died.

We had a rabbit die the next day.  I have no clue why.  I went out to feed the rabbits that morning and one of them was stiff as a board.

The first thing I thought . . . both times . . . was that I was a failure as an urban farmer.  I must have done something wrong.  I must have forgotten to do something, or done something incorrectly . . . but, of course, that was ridiculous.  Nobody loves their animals and birds like Bev and I love ours.  We pamper them all, from the newborn quail to the cranky old hen, they are all our pets and we love our time with them. We have studied and we work hard to do things properly, so the fact is those two died simply because it was their time to die.  It was nobody’s fault and that’s just the way it goes.  Despite my best efforts, it just didn’t work out for that hen or that rabbit.

That true story is a perfect metaphor for the profession of writing.

There are going to be times when, despite your best writing, and despite your best marketing efforts, you simply will not get the views or the sales you desire.  That’s just the way it goes, my friends.  It is not a direct condemnation of your abilities as a writer, and it may not be a condemnation of your abilities as a marketer.  Maybe it just wasn’t the right time, or place, for that article or book . . . and maybe it never will be.

There are no guarantees in the writing profession.  Most writers fail to achieve success measured by great sales.  That’s just “the real of it,” and no amount of weeping and gnashing of teeth will change that.

Write, first and foremost, for the sheer love of writing.  That way you will never feel like you failed.

THE SECRET TO FREELANCING

I was asked the other day what my secret was regarding freelancing, or at least one solid piece of advice for making money freelancing . . . I have a couple things to say about it, if you’re interested.

It took me seven years of hard work to get where I’m at right now.  None of my success happened overnight, so there’s my first piece of advice . . . treat it like any other job and work hard.

The other thing I think is important is to not put all your eggs in one basket.  I make money from writing from a number of sources.  I have income from my books (15 and counting) and I have income from customers (5 steady customers) and I have income from services I provide to writers.  I do that so in case one source of income dries up, I still have others to fall back on.  I think diversifying is a wise move in freelancing.  I also believe in the Numbers Game. The more books I write and publish, the more income I’ll receive.  I learned this from common sense and a book I read called “Write, Publish, Repeat.”

So there you have it, and add one more: I have a constant desire to succeed, so I refuse to give up.

Have a great week and remember, you are appreciated greatly by little old me.

Bill

“Helping writers to spread their wings and fly.”

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Get Out and Meet Your Characters

6 Jun

I work two farmers’ markets each week.

And it’s fascinating!

Here’s something you may, or may not, know about me: I’m an introvert.  It’s painful at times, truly.  I don’t feel like I fit in this world, and I avoid groups of people like the plague.   I will always speak if spoken to, but I would rather not get into a conversation most days.  I’m also painfully shy.  Always have been and I suspect I always will be.

So for me to enjoy working a farmers market is amazing . . . and I’m oddly good at it.  Bev says I am charismatic when I’m working the markets and I try to never argue with Bev.  I was that way working retail at a store I owned back in the 80’s.  Customers loved to come into our store and shoot the shit with me, but at the end of the day I was exhausted and conflicted because a part of me hated the experience.

Anyway, back to the story.  I work two farmers’ markets each week, and it is fascinating.  People are fascinating.  People, in my humble opinion, are the greatest show on earth.  The markets give me the chance to really observe people, to listen to them, to gauge their reactions, to watch them as they talk to friends or as they talk to me, to pick up on individual quirks and nuances, little facial tells when they experience something for the first time . . . the old and the young, the healthy and infirmed, the skinny and the full-bodies, the physically-beautiful and the intrinsically-beautiful, they are all on display for four hours each market, and I am enthralled by them all, and . . .

It is a great training ground for any writer!  I think working some sort of retail should be a required activity for any novelist.  Seriously!  Fiction is about the five senses. It is about characters and reactions.  It is about the human experience, the telling of the story, the story itself, and the reception of the story, and a good novelist needs to be aware of that “human experience” connection.

So get out there and rock n roll with other humans.  Watch them!  Truly watch them!  And then borrow from them the next time you sit down to work on that novel or poem.

THANK YOU LIL SIS

A big thank you to Cyndi for guest-blogging here last week.  It was just what the doctor ordered for me, and judging from the response it was very interesting for most of you . . . a win-win situation!

AND ANOTHER THANK YOU, WORLDWIDE

A HUGE thank you to all my writer friends, in New Zealand, in Jolly Old England, in Malaysia and Canada and Iowa, in New York and Ireland and Brazil…thank you for making this ultra-shy introvert feel wanted and loved!  You rock my world!

Bill

“Helping writers spread their wings and fly.”

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