For the Birds

So, I decided to go off on a tangent today.   Last Sunday my father dug out the old bread making machine to try to make bread.  Unfortunately it came out like a brick with the top sort of mutilated and looking like it fallen out of a mixing machine and then just hardened into clumps.    The bread itself was awful and he was about to throw it out when I suggested I take it home.  I wanted to let it harden and feed it to the birds that frequent my garden.  I figured that birds will eat just about anything.  Boy was I wrong.

This darn bread lived up to every bad expectation.  I put the hardened chunks in the feeder and the birds wouldn't even peck at it.  When I sprinkled seed about in the pan they pecked around the bread to get at the seed.  Finally the local blue jay stopped by.  Now this little fellow is quite the character and he eats almost anything I put out there.  He took one peck of that bread and then tossed it aside to get at some other juicy morsel the other birds had left behind.

Ultimately, my dad's bread turned out to be fit for neither man nor bird.

Some Fresh Ideas

Recently I joined the wonderful San Fansisco Writer's Online University  after the suggestion from an editor for another project.  This page is an inspiration, a wonderful resource for myself and anyone who is a writer in this day and age.  Joining is free, and there are online lessons for podcast that you can download for free.  You can also pay a minimum fee for more robust subjects of podcast.  Both areas cover anything from blogging, to editing, to inspiring characters to just writing in general. 

After taking a moment to look through some of the ideas, I have decided to incorporate them into my blog.  I am going to try to start blogging every day, if not three times a week or more, talking about Aboard the Phantom Express and my ideas surrounding it.  I want to see my blog grow with this site's help, and I am certain it will do so. 

One of the things I am most excited about is to start blogging my book.  As a self-published novel, this will be a great way to expose my book to the public so that everyone can see what I've been talking about all this time.  My first post will be my hook, of course, to get readers.  From there, I will try to talk about passages of the book and discuss how and why I wrote them. So, here is to  Phantom Train back on track!

The Publishing Gamble

Well, I have just submitted Phantom Express to Chronicle Books in the hope that they will see what so many people have in my little book.   It's always such an exciting prospect sending to a publisher or an agent, but there's also so much nerves at stake.  I think the best I can liken it to is playing poker.  I know, I know, publishing and gambling are nothing alike, but they share many things in common. 

Like gambling, publishing takes a lot of luck and a lot of nerve.  You have to know how to play your cards right, to read the table.  The publisher is the house, they hold all the stakes and the house nearly always wins when it comes to accepting your bet.  As a writer its so easy to try to steel your nerves and then have them utterly crushed when you get a rejection letter.  A rejection letter is as much a blow as losing a big hand.  You can be so sure of winning, only to have just a slightly lower hand.

In my case, I hope that I'm holding a flush when it comes to Chronicle. I hope they'll see my gambler's mentality in approaching an independent publisher for my unique work.  I think they'll look at my hand, see what I have and see how they can benefit by it.  After all, in gambling and writing, the house always wants you to come back and spend more.

Switching tracks

For a while now I have been lacking what might be the most important thing in a writer's life, a spark of imagination.  Its so easy to get distracted in life, what with tv, internet, radio, work and just general life.  So often I read about writers and how writing is an almost religious experience.  Writers spend hours just finding the right location, they stick to a steady schedule of writing, break and more writing. 

I suppose it is easy for a writer who writes as their one profession, they can devote endless hours to preparing for writing, but I have little bits of time here and there with work and other things.  It becomes a struggle to put thoughts together, to coordinate them.  Its easy to become discouraged as well with a lack of other writers to work with.  So many groups meet at times that are completely different from what I can attend.  It seems like the whole writing world is on one schedule and level of life and I am on another that is the exact opposite.

I draw once again to my analogy of a train for this blog.  At the moment, I am chugging along at a slow pace, regaining my momentum.  Ahead lays a switchboard of opportunities, and I need to decide where I need to go and what I need to do to get there.   There's plenty of room for mistakes, for chances taken or lost, but that's the way it is with any thing in life. 

I think and hope that this blog will help me continue to flesh some of my own frustrations or thoughts about writing.  I just have to remain on track!