Barbara Ardinger's Blog, page 8

Welcome to 2012

As I was brushing my teeth this morning, I was thinking I should write
a little fable—“Barbie in Wonderland.” Except no one except two of my mothers-in-law
(my father-in-law married three times) has ever called me Barbie (and don’t
you dare; I’ll snap at you) and the Wonderland I’m thinking about is the
world of social media. Yeah, to quote Alice: “Curiouser and curiouser.”

Here we are, four days past the beginning of Aquarius, and I always try
to write my blog a day or two before the sun enters the next sign. I sure
missed it this month! Why? I’m glad to say that I’ve been busy. I’m editing
new books for two new authors. One is a bloke in England who’s writing
about how to improve your life. He’s giving some good advice. The other
is a physician who has enduring interest in the energy of X-rays and MRIs
and other medical apparati. (OK, that would be the proper plural of apparatus
if apparatus were a Latin word. I like it better than apparatuses.) This
physician is also interested in healing energy. He’s had encounters with
the Edgar Cayce folks, attended Jack Houck’s spoon-bending workshops, and
met a lot of other people who do energy work, mostly in holistic healing.
Me, too. I once got a kiss on the cheek from one of Cayce’s sons, and I’ve
bent spoons with Jack. And I’ve been editing for the American
Holistic Health Association, whose president and founder, Suzan Walter,
has been my friend since 1981 when we met at a Women In Management meeting.
I’m also still editing the memoir of the solo violinist, who has had an
extremely interesting life, and an author whose book I last worked on in
2006 is now coming back for more editing.  

But that’s not what I mean by wandering around in Wonderland. The Wonderland
in question is the world of social media. I’m working up to it. Why? To
publicize

Secret Lives, of course! I think it was my son who helped me
get started on Facebook a couple years ago. Now I have a
Barbara Ardinger FB page  and a

Secret Lives page, to which I post a few times a week. Maybe
that’s not enough, but when I finish editing in the middle of the afternoon,
I am pooped. Editing is extremely labor-intensive work because I’m looking
at every comma and semicolon and parenthese (singular of parentheses),
plus spelling, and I’m also doing some fact-checking. One of my authors,
for example, is just finishing a history of Bolivia, but he doesn’t know
how to add the tildes and accent marks that Spanish words require. So I
not only fact-check his dates and spelling, but I also add the tildes and
accent marks for him. And by the middle of the afternoon, all I want to
do is collapse on the couch and pet the cats. A man who lives here in Long
Beach and I are talking about how he can help me publicize
Secret Lives, and one thing he said I could do in the afternoon is
get out my iPhone and send (post? text-message?) some comments. Well, (A)
I do not have an iPhone, though I did buy a new landline phone right after
Christmas because my beloved purple phone died, and (B) like I just said,
my synapses are in shreds when I finish a day of editing.

So I have two Facebook pages. I post to them when I can. As soon as I
figure out how to download the photos from the camera I bought last week,
I’ll post photos, too. (The camera I bought is supposed to be idiot-proof.
We’ll see.)   

I’ve also begun blogging on a nifty WordPress site,
Feminism and Religion. I was invited by my friend Carol Christ, author
of

She Who Changes, which is a terrific book about process philosophy.
I think I’m supposed to submit a blog every two weeks, though we’re still
talking about schedules. My most recent blog is about humor in religion,
and I ended the blog with Verbena, my favorite Found Goddess. But most
of the comments I’ve received so far are in response to my assertion that
the holy books of the standard-brand religions don’t contain much humor
at all. My point is that the Goddess has a sense of humor.

My next blog will appear on Super Bowl Sunday. I am not a football fan.
I see no point in watching large millionaires giving each other concussions.
Part of my blog is an excerpt from the chapter in
Secret Lives where one of the Goddess’s “thoughty devotees” gives
her opinion of the Super Bowl. In the novel, this is the day the Norns
(gone mad in the modern world) declare war on our circle of crones and
use thunder and lightning as their weapons. The crones create a cone of
power that is steered by the Green Man and one of the younger women. The
dragon they created in Ch. 1 comes back to join the fight, and the women
invoke martial goddesses. I recently also wrote four political parodies
(did I mention that I watch MSNBC when my synapses start to function again?),
infomercials, which I will post on FAR. One for each of the current Republican
candidates. Hah!

A friend on a list I’m on recently recommended
GoodReads, so I’m working on that, too. Yesterday another of my authors,
whose young adult novel I edited late last year, spent an hour on the phone
with me getting me set up on GoodReads. I’ve put a lot of the books I’ve
read in the last six months or so on my GR bookshelf and I’m asking anyone
who’s read
Secret Lives to review it on GR, too. I obviously want to build up
a big audience for all my books, especially
Secret Lives. (Duh.)

And I’m tiptoeing into the world of Twitter. Now that really is behind
the looking-glass. I get on that page and feel the Jabberwock stalking
me. Well, no, it’s not really that wild or scary. I just don’t usually
know what to do when I get there. I feel like Alice running after the embodied
cards and chess pieces. Faster and faster, but where am I going? And all
of this is to publicize
Secret Lives.

I was the guest of honor at a literary salon here in Long Beach on Sunday.
I read a bit of the prologue and said that the goddess that appears to
the shaman is the same goddess I actually saw in 1992 when I almost died
after an all-day asthma attack. Next, I spoke about what happens all too
often to elderly women who lose their homes and are parked in retirement
centers. Then I read the language of flowers ritual, which brings tears
to readers’ eyes (mine, too). Finally, I introduced the audience to Madame
Blavatsky, the talking cat, and Frances J. Swift, the compleat bureaucrat
who is residence manager at the Towers. I ended by reading from the chapter
in which the cat is reading
Alice in Wonderland and disguises herself as the Cheshire Cat to
annoy (haunt) Frances. “I’m mad. You’re mad. We’re all mad.” Poor Frances—haunted
by a talking cat that appears and disappears. No wonder she has a nervous
breakdown. “Off with her head.” Indeed.

I hope you’ll all buy and read
Secret Lives. Make all my wandering through the social media worth
while, Write reviews of it on GoodReads and Amazon. Favorable reviews,
please. And five stars!

Happy holidays!

I went to the Circle of Aradia’s Yule ritual last night. It was the 40th
anniversary of Z Budpest’s invention of Dianic Wicca, and Z was there as
an honored guest and she and I had a nice little chat. It was also the
25th anniversary of the Circle of Aradia, founded by Ruth Barrett, the
best ritualist I’ve ever worked with. It was good to see Ruth and a whole
bunch of other women I haven’t seen for various reasons in five or ten
years. (None of us, of course, look any older.) Among the 200 or so women
in attendance was a journalist for (I think) a website in the San Fernando
Valley. She was looking very bewildered at the circle casting and the dancing
and chanting, so because I don’t dance, I went over to her and spoke with
her for a little while. “What’s going on here?” she asked. After I explained
that I in no way represent COA in any official capacity, I spoke to her
about the ritual year and the Yule celebration.

It’s a celebration of the light, I told her. Yule is the winter solstice,
the longest night of the year, immediately after which the earliest, tiniest
spark of light is reborn. Then the wheel of the year takes us through the
spring equinox to the summer solstice, which is the longest day of the
year and gives us the most light. Then the light begins to fade again and
we enter the “dark side” (no, not Darth Vader’s dark side) of the year,
which takes us past the fall equinox and back to the winter solstice. “It’s
both literal and symbolic,” I told the reporter, and I also suggested that
she see the year as a day moving from midnight (winter solstice) to noon
(summer solstice) and back to midnight.

We deal with dark and light in our lives, too—our careers, our daily work,
our relationships, everything. Like all of us, I’ve had my dark times—mainly
the whole decade of the 1990s when I was doing temp office work and living
on meager unemployment “benefits” between temp assignments. I also lived
a mile from the Nixon Library with a crazy roommate; after six months with
her, I moved to Long Beach (a bright moment), but then I was evicted from
the first condo I rented because the owners let it go into foreclosure.
I was homeless for a month and lived for part of that time in an SRO hotel.
I had to sneak my cats up the back stairs. The men gathered in the women’s
bathroom to smoke, so I emptied the litter box in the trash in their bathroom.
But the light came back on when I was walking down 2nd Street one day and
came upon a yard sale. I asked the woman if she was moving, she said yes
and showed me her apartment, then told me where the owner of that condo
lived. I walked down the street to Mary's house. Mary said her cat never
approached visitors. Within ten minutes, her cat was sitting in my lap.
And I had a place to live. That’s how I met my friends Michael and Angelo,
and now Angelo (who bleaches my hair) and I go to the theater together
a lot. Today, a decade later, I’ve got it pretty good with my editing work
and a new book published. Yes, of course, I’ll mention

Secret Lives every chance I get.

I wrote about both “endarkenment” and “enlightenment” in

Pagan Every Day and just posted the pages so you can read them
again. (Scroll down past solar gods and Mothers' Night, December 25 and
24.) I also spoke about Yule and the light and Modraniht to my friend Pat
Lynch a few days ago when she interviewed me on Womens Radio.

We’re in the holiday season and gazing at Hannukah (another celebration
of the light), Christmas, and Kwanzaa with their family gatherings and
gift exchanges. I bought Charles a couple books (no surprise there) and
bought Phish a ceramic goddess she saw and coveted at the Long Beach WomanSpirit
fair a couple weeks ago. I’ve also received several electronic Christmas
letters—consider this my letter; I’m too lazy to write another one—and
some real cards. One is from Michael Ball. Members of his fan club get
a card from him every year. Michael’s a handsome man, an actor as well
as a singer. But he’s doing
Sweeney Todd now, so the fan club Christmas card shows him in full
Sweeney drag. He’s almost unrecognizable … and his message says “Have a
bloody good Christmas.” Hilarious!

Here’s the rest of my abbreviated holiday letter/blog. My major news is
that I published

Secret Lives, my novel about grandmothers who live in Long Beach
and do magic. My Christmas wish is that you will buy and read and enjoy
the book.

Tonight I think I’ll watch my favorite version of Dickens’
Christmas Carol, the one starring George C. Scott. I always enjoy
watching Scrooge rise out of his dark nature and into the holiday light
that presumably lasts for the rest of his life. He gets some really fast
psychotherapy from those three spirits! Tiny Tim famously says, “May God
bless us, every one,” to which I’ll add my wish for peace on earth. but
in small, local packages. My wish is that we’ll end the other war in the
Middle East and that everyone everywhere will have enough to eat and that
the Goddess will bless Her daughters and Her sons with health and abundance.
If we act locally by being courteous to the people we meet  and paying
small acts of kindness forward, we can add little bits of lovingkindness
to the consciousness of the planet and work toward a critical mass that
can transform the planet. Let’s all work on that. And buy

Secret Lives !

How to sell more books??

When I decided to self-publish
Secret Lives, I knew I was going to be doing a lot of work. I’m having
an interesting adventure. Also investing a fair amount of money in the
adventure. I’d like to sell more books and make a return on that investment.
I suppose I could summon up some Great, Universal Mind Power and project
it into the heads of every pagan or witchy woman on the planet.
Buy Secret Lives. Buy Secret Lives.
Buy Secret Lives. Mind Power? Yeah. Right. Like Universal Mind
Power works. So I keep working on PR.




Six of my books were published by traditional publishers, large and small.
Here’s how that works. You and/or your agent submit the manuscript (or
sample chapters) to an acquisitions editor. You wait. Eventually, the acquisitions
editor gets back to you and/or your editor. If they like the book, they
write a contract, the terms of which are almost totally in favor of the
publisher. So you and/or your editor do some negotiating to get you a better
deal—a higher advance on royalties, a higher percentage (your royalty),
more free copies, etc. Next, you answer all the questions on the author
questionnaire, which is where you list all the important people you know
and your media connections. Oh, and you give more information about the
book. Then you finish writing the book and it’s published and the publisher
does lots of PR and your book ends up a best seller.

Well, not quite. I believe what I’ve described was largely true half a
century or more ago, back in the good old days when publishers were still
run by individuals who cared about good writing and respected their authors.
Those were the days when publishers took good care of their authors. Today,
in the Age of Murdoch, publishers are bits of multinational corporations
and seem not to care about anything except making money. A book is a product.
An author is an adjunct to the product.

My first book, a mass market paperback titled
Seeing Solutions, was published in 1989. A book of guided visualizations,
it was published at a time when there were few books on that topic. It
got some very favorable reviews. But not enough. I sit here today and think
about how naïve I was. First, a psychic who was a friend of a friend “got”
that my little book would sell a million copies and I’d be traveling around
the world. And I believed her. Second, I paid a bunch of money to a woman
I’d met at a leads club to do PR. Trouble was, she was going through a
personal crisis at the time, and when I talked to people she’d booked me
to be interviewed by, they kept saying that if they spoke with this PR
agent for an hour, she spent fifty minutes talking about her personal crisis.
One Sunday morning, she phoned and told me that she’d figured out that
her father was the infamous and unknown Black Dahlia killer. That’s when
I fired her. We learn expensive lessons when we’re young and naïve, don’t
we.




I’ve been treated very well by some of my publishers and still call some
of my editors friends. One plays the bassoon, and when I went to a concert
where I heard a bassoon solo, I sent her a note. She recently wrote to
me and said they want to convert

Practicing the Presence of the Goddess to Kindle. But of course! 

Other publishers haven’t been as kind. One changed the title of my book
without telling me.

Finding New Goddesses became
The New Goddesses. Fortunately, I had a spy in the room. After she
told me about that dumb new title, I wrote a series of very strong emails
to the publisher and explained why my title was the correct title. I CC’d
all my friends, including other authors, one of whom told me later that
the energy in my emails had crashed her computer. But I got to keep my
title! A couple years later, I met my editor and her boss at a Book Expo.
She and I moved to a table down the aisle to talk about goddesses. Her
boss sat in his booth and gave us that old hairy stare.

Dan Poynter, who seems to know what he’s talking about, tells us that
the “old NYC publishers” are becoming irrelevant, that people want to read
books the NYC publishers reject, that more and more authors are self-publishing.
And e-books are also increasingly popular. So I sent
Secret Lives to Sherry Wachter to typeset and design, and she did
a beautiful job, and then we sent it to CreateSpace, which also did a good
job. I like CreateSpace a lot because they employ live people you can talk
to on the phone. Like my favorite Make It Work tech, they explain things.
Clearly. I’d like to adopt some of them.
Secret Lives has also received some very enthusiastic
reviewshand I’ve been
interviewed several times, including two sessions on blogtalkradio
that were loads of fun. More reviews and interviews are coming up in magazines
like
SageWoman and
Crone, both published by my long-time friend Anne Niven. I’ve also
submitted the octogenarian sex scene (which is pretty tame) to a publication
that focuses on “senior erotica.” I hope they like it!

I want this novel to be read. I love the women I wrote about—they’re as
real in their way as you and I are. So is the cat. Well … maybe. The cats
I live with don’t speak English. I’m as old now as some of the women I
was writing about twenty years ago, and I know that the issues the senior
citizens in
Secret Lives deal with are real issues that my friends and I are
facing.

So how do I sell more books? If you have any ideas that work, send me
an email and we'll talk. If it’s a useful idea, I’ll give you one of my
nifty
Secret Lives mouse pads.

Dialogue and Dialect, Part 2

Last week I wrote about American English dialects and why we need to write
good, realistic dialogue for our characters. To show what I mean, I examined
the way some characters in
Secret Lives speak. Now I’ll write about three central characters.




Emma Clare, one of the founders of the circle, speaks an ever-variable
Ozark dialect. She comes from a traditional of Celtic witches, and her
grandmother, Mammy Annis, lived in the Ozarks. In Chapter 11, “Daughters
of the Powers of Fire,” I retell the family story. That’s where real library
research is useful. The works of Vance Randolph were helpful, as were other
books on Ozark customs. That’s how I learned, for example, that when you’re
making hominy you have to rub the corn to get the ash mud, hulls, and eyes
out. I wanted Emma Clare (who is 97 years old) to speak accurately, but
I didn’t want her to sound like a cartoon hillbilly or a refugee from
Hee-Haw. When she talks about her grandmother (below), I had to make
sure her speech is not too countrified. Readers have to understand her!
“Methody” is a real word (but not much used today) and the lottery is an
allusion to Shirley Jackson’s unforgettable short story. (I give the link
to the story in the FREE READER’S GUIDE on this site).


      


      “Well, then,” Emma Clare began, “Mammy
Annis kept her people rooted in the land and the old religion. They prospered
and ever’thing done well. But as the circuit riders found their ways into
our hills, some believed that modren gospel they brung. Baptist or Nazarene
or Methody or whatever, the people allus came back to Mammy Annis, though,
when they needed real help. For mule races,” she laughed, “and important
things like luck in the lottery. For birth control and impotence, too.
She really knew how to bring in a good harvest.”




In a later story, when Emma Clare conducts the croning ritual for her
granddaughter, Marie, her Ozark accent disappears. This is to show that
she can speak standard American English if she wants to. She just doesn’t
often want to.




Two characters speak languages all their own. Frances J. Swift is the
compleat bureaucrat who manages the Center Towers. Madame Blavatsky is
the talking cat. I heard their voices—like the voices of all the characters—speaking
in my head and wrote down their dialogue. I tried to spell and punctuate
it so the readers of Secret Lives would also hear their voices. It’s important
to remember, however, that even when we’re reading silently, there’s a
voice in our head reading aloud. That’s why the voice of each character
has to be both distinctive and comprehensible. If the dialect is too thick,
the reader’s mental tongue keeps getting tangled and the reading slows
down, and if the dialogue is bad enough, the reader may just throw the
book across the room. (At 650 pages,
Secret Lives weights 2.4 pounds. That’s a dangerous weapon.)




When we first meet Frances in Chapter 2, as Bertha is sneaking the cat
into the Center Towers, Frances assume a faux-cordial voice. “Well, Miss
Bertha! How are we this lovely evening? Did we have a nice visit with our
nephew? He’s such a fine young man, isn’t he, so good of him to take such
good care of you.” In the story about Coyote the bag lady, Frances is highly
suspicious of what “those women” are doing. She doesn’t want any homeless
people in her domain. “Now, you are surely aware of the rules and policies
of this establishment,” she says, “wherein guests, invited or not, are
concerned. No unauthorized overnight guests are permitted without specific
authorization from the authorities … that is, ah, from me.” You see? She
speaks like every awful corporate memo we’ve ever read. And it gets worse.




In the next story, Frances accuses Bertha of stealing food from the lunchroom.




   “Now, as you must know, we cannot tolerate wasteful habits
and practices here at the Center Towers. Our esteemed management, that
is to say, our highly trained culinary dietician, plans our culinary menus
with the greatest possible care to fulfill the daily nutritional needs
of our elderly senior citizens who reside here with us, such as yourself.
And we hope and expect that all meals will be taken in our luxurious dining
room, except in the case of unavoidable illness, that is … of course unavoi—”


   “I eat there every day” [Bertha replies]. I’m almost always
nutritionally and culinarilly satisfied.”


   “And you … er … carry purloined food away.” She leaned toward
Bertha, peering at her as if to detect evidence of a guilty conscience.
“I’ll come plainly to the point, Miss Bertha. Are you … ahem … saving,
collecting, or hoarding food to save? So many of our elderly residents
feel such a need to hoard, to clutter their … now you must be aware that
hoarding is unnecessary and unsanitary. It betrays an exhibition of poor
citizenship here at the Center Towers, as it could lead to inexact and
imprecise planning and significant overexpenditure from our already generous
nutritional food budget line. And hoarding can … ahem … also lead to infestations
of noxious insects, which would lead to the further monetary expense of
fumigation.” She took a deep breath. “This is only a teensy hint, Miss
Bertha….”

See how it works? Lawyers and other bureaucrats write extremely redundant
prose to—they say—avoid ambiguity. During the 1990s, I did temp work in
offices. Frances talks just like people I worked with. What comes out of
her mouth is convoluted nonsense. It's hard to write, too, until you get
into the flow. Then you kinda can't help yourself. And pretty soon, she
keeps hearing someone saying, “Off with her head!” It’s Madame Blavatsky
in disguise as the Cheshire Cat.

Yes, that cat. I hired PumpUpYourBook to organize a blog tour for
Secret Lives, and one of my assignments was to either interview a
character in the book or have one character interview another. I couldn’t
help myself. My interviewee was Madame Blavatsky. The first words out of
her mouth in Chapter 2 of the novel show her personality. She’s talking
to Bertha and the others who are discussing what they want a familiar to
do. “Youse girls know yer stuff,” she says “Yeah, ya know what yer doin’
here. I wasnt so sure at first, ya know. Dint know if Bertha here was typical
or not. But now I’m satisfied. Yeah, youse girls know how it works.”




Why does a cat who was a famous 19th-century occult author talk like she
used to live in New Jersey? I have no idea. But that’s what she really
sounds like. I can still hear her in my head even as I write this blog.
(Oh, gee—now she wants me to erase all the foregoing and give the whole
blog to her.) This cat helps Bertha turn a psychic fair into a vaudeville
show, drives poor Frances into a nervous breakdown, and shows up in a four-footed
Ghostbusters costume when the crones decide to do a reversing ritual.

Writing her dialogue got tricky, too. I had to remember to take the apostrophes
out and spell words to match her pronunciation without going overboard
and making her dialogue look incomprehensible. I’ll let her have the last
word today. Here’s the opening of the blog interview. “Hiya, dearie,” says
Madame Blavatsky. “It’s good ta be here. This here innerview is gonna help
the author of that novel we’re in.” After considerable braggadocio, the
interview closes. “I done a lotta good in that novel. Our author was really
smart ta put me in her book. I’m the star!”

Dialogue and Dialect--Talking Gooder English

I’ve just learned a new word used by Shakespeare probably never by anyone
else. Vastidity. It means bigness. It’s almost as much fun as a word I
heard once heard somewhere and like to use—nakedidity. What is it about
that “idity” ending? Three tiny syllables. It just sounds funny.




I’m rereading Simon Winchester’s fascinating history of the Oxford English
Dictionary,
The Meaning of Everything (Oxford University Press, 2004), and getting
my knowledge of the history of our language refreshed.

Language is a major part of our lives. It’s how we communicate. (
Duh.) Even if we’re sending text messages, we’re still using language.
It’s said that the basic grammar and syntax rules of our mother tongue
are “hard-wired” in our heads at an early age. As infants, we listen to
people talking and put the words together and pretty soon we’re talking
too. We’re using language ourselves. “Language” in the sense I’m using
it here, BTW, comes from the French word for tongue and was first used
in early Modern English around 1600, while Shakespeare was still working.
“Talk” as a verb comes from “tale” and “tell” and was first used around
1548, shortly before Shakespeare was born.

As an editor, one of the issues I often address with my authors—both those
whose mother tongue is American English and those who are coming from other
mother tongues—is how their characters talk. Many of my authors start out
writing dialogue that is stiff and unnatural. It’s like they’re writing
the stilted alien dialogue we heard in the sf movies of the 1950s. But
characters in books need to talk like real people. How they talk helps
readers know about them without our having to write lots and lots of exposition
and description.  




“Go sit in the mall,” I keep telling my authors. “Listen to how people
actually talk. Don’t eavesdrop—what they say isn’t important. Listen to
how they say what they’re saying. Listen to their
word choices. Listen to
the rhythms of their sentences. Listen to how regular people use
sentence fragments when they talk, how they use contractions and clichés
and idioms. Pay attention to their verbal tics like ‘like’ and ‘you know.’”




Characters talking right is part of the verisimilitude of a novel. Their
speech has to be appropriate to where they live and to their class. The
numerous dialects of American English reflect our economic and social classes,
geographical areas, levels of education, and other differences in the population.
I’m wondering, though, if the stupid, nearly illiterate “language” of text
messaging isn’t beginning to destroy some of our American English dialects,
at least in writing if not in speaking. Anyone who lives anywhere can write
“OMG” or use numbers as letters (“good 4 u,” “gr8,” etc.) or leave out
the “unimportant” words—like prepositions—of a sentence. It’s the tiny
words and phrases that tell people where we come from. If you listen carefully
to some TV shows, you can tell that though they may be set in New York,
they’re filmed in Los Angeles with writers and actors from California.
Someone living in NYC is not likely to use our west coast “surfer dude”
dialect. Back east, for example, they don’t say “totally” and “majorly.”
Out here we do. Part of the “charm” of
Jersey Shore is that the people talk right. We can tell they’re not
actors from Nebraska or Oklahoma or—OMG!—Santa Monica.




Most of the characters in
Secret Lives speak what is called standard American English plus
some slang and some four-letter words. (Yes, old women know how to cuss.
Why should that be a surprise?) But several characters speak in distinctive
dialects. Two of them—Emma Clare and Madame Blavatsky—are major characters.
I’ll discuss them next week, along with Frances J. Swift.




Let’s start with a few characters that don’t appear in every chapter.
One member of the circle is Verlea, a black woman who was born in New Orleans,
worked as a domestic until she retired, and now lives in the Center Towers
Retirement Residence in Long Beach. At one point, talking about the sorrowful
history of black women in America, she loses both her temper and standard
English. This happens when two characters “adopt” a homeless bag lady named
Coyote, who has suffered so much abuse that she’s nearly dead. I didn’t
want either of these black women to speak “ebonics.” Coyote says very little,
but as far as we know, she’s always been on the streets, so “fuck” is a
major part of her vocabulary. To be sure these two women’s dialects were
appropriate to their characters, I asked two of my speech students at the
university to read Coyote’s story. They made some corrections, which I
gratefully accepted.




It’s always good to get help. I also asked B.J., the daughter of a friend
at Long Beach WomanSpirit, to read the stories in which Janie, who is 11
½ (going on 40), appears. She told me that Janie needed to grow up and
not talk like a five-year-old. Good advice! That’s where the “Motherrrrr”
came from.




Another character who, like Coyote, appears in only one story is Celestia
Wolfe, who is my version of Little Red Riding Hood. She’s in the book because
she has to deliver an important letter to Herta, one of the major characters.
Celestia was supposed to visit Herta in the 1940s, but she somehow wandered
off the path. In her red dress, Celestia looks like a 1940s movie star,
and though she’s managed to learn some English, her syntax is not quite
right. That makes it easy to tell she’s not from here:




   “They told me I would meet the grandmothers here,” she said
after a minute. “Yes. Grandmothers. Yes. How do you do? I am so nice to
meet you.”


   “Well,” said Maude, “you’ve come to the right place for that.
Nearly every woman here is a grandmother—”


   “Can we help you?” Rosa repeated. “At least come on inside.
Don’t you think it’s a bit warm today to be wearing a raincoat?”


   “Yes, thank you for being warm today. With you I will come
inside. There is a room, perhaps?”




It’s her syntax that distances her from the circle and from us. She is
obviously foreign. But I didn’t want her to be too foreign, nor did I want
her to sound like Andy Kaufman, so I kept her language fairly subtle. In
her story (Chapter 8), she is captured by two horny old World War II veterans,
whom I had a lot of fun comparing to Tex Avery’s lust-filled cartoon wolves,
before she is finally able to deliver her message to Herta. I also got
to write a fist fight in that chapter. That was a challenge!




To be continued. Come back next week and find out about the voices of
Emma Clare, Madame Blavatsky, and Frances J. Swift. Each one speaks an
English dialect all her own.

Publishing is an Educational Experience

Back in the olden days in college, in addition to my majors in English
and theater and education, I acquired what I like to refer to as my “secular
education.” I had been a fairly solitary child before I left home and was
extremely naïve when I got to college. My secular education overflowed
with Educational Experiences. Dorm life. (I describe a real dorm party
in Ch. 15 of
Secret Lives. Some of the characters went to the same college I did.)
College theater. (I was a member of the Black Mask student group and worked
on all the plays for four years.) Cutting classes while sitting with ten
or twenty friends in around a table in the student union. (On reflection,
not a good idea.) Boyfriends. (Don’t ask.)




Educational Experiences, of course, teach us those famous Life Lessons.
Like don’t come back to the dorm at midnight after a cast party because
when I was in college the housemother locked the dorm and you have to crawl
in through a basement window. Which I did a couple months into my freshman
year. I was grounded for a week. Like don’t believe everything an actor
tells you. Like don’t cut class. It took me until graduate school to learn
that lesson.




Today, forty-odd years later, I am still having Educational Experiences.
The big one? Publishing
Secret Lives, of course. As of September 8, I have released my beloved
crones and their friends to the world. The novel is now for sale on
Amazon.com and the Kindle conversion is in the works. I’ll investigate
B&N pretty soon and start a Nook conversion, too.

Getting on Amazon has been majorly educational. If you go to the page
that sells
Secret Lives, you’ll see vendor listings. Used copies?? There are
no used copies! As I’m writing this, I know who’s ordered copies of the
book. Friends of mine. What are these vendors selling? I don’t have a clue.
I’ve sent emails to them. No reply. The customer service rep from Amazon
who phoned me a couple days ago to help solve this mystery has begun an
investigation of the vendors for me.

The folks at CreateSpace are courteous and helpful. Thanks to them—and
to Sherry, who designed and typeset the book and knows how CreateSpace
works—I have a real book. I also have my very own Member Dashboard, and
the nice people there have helped me order review copies and carry out
other important authorial tasks. Things that are “intuitive” to some computer
users just leave me shaking my head. So I ask for help. And receive it.
I can still hear my father saying, “If it’s worth having, it’s worth asking
for.” I’ve remembered that good advice all my life. And I also know the
value of “please” and “thank you.” There are a couple folks at CreateSpace
that I’d adopt if I could.




As I keep telling the authors whose books I edit, the author is ultimately
responsible for the accuracy of her book. That’s why publishers send us
galleys. We need to read them Very, Very Carefully.. My son, who holds
an M.A. in English, proofread the manuscript before I sent it to Sherry
and found errors I’d overlooked. Two or three trusted friends also read
it and found errors. The funniest one was “Ralph Loren.” We fixed that
right away. Then I read the pdf of the text. And found more errors and
typos. Typos are, of course, examples of spontaneous generation. They grow
by themselves and like termites infest and chew up a manuscript.




But you know what? When an author is reading her book, she tends to read
what she knows is on the page. Which is not necessarily what is really
there. And there’s a big difference between reading (a) a Word document
on a computer screen, (b) a pdf of the text on the computer screen, (c)
a printed copy of the pdf, and (d) the actual page in the actual bound
book. It looks different every time. That’s why I found thirty-eight errors
in the first proof copy.
Thirty-eight errors! How could that happen? Well, for one thing,
I’d been reading what was in my head, not what was actually on the page.
Sherry fixed ’em all. I hope there are no more errors in the book …………
but those dratted termity typos might be crawling around in there again.




I also (with help) set up a Facebook page for

Secret Lives to which I post comments and little snippets of
the text and the reader’s guide. That 500-character limit is making me
crazy, but people are Liking the book and responding and writing comments.
If you’re reading this, please go to the Facebook page and Like the book
and speak up. Write me a note.

Now I’m doing a bunch of other things to publicize the book. I went to
Pagan Pride L.A. on September 18 to give a workshop on writing pagan fiction
and sell books and I came home with nearly $300. I’ve put the book on
Witchvox. I’m working with a blog tour organizer. I’m going to try
to get interviewed in October (for Halloween) by the local Long Beach papers.
I’ll be reviewed and interviewed in magazines and on websites. You know
what I’d love? For
Secret Lives to become a cult favorite. What can you do to help my
wish come true? Please do whatever you can.

Finally, I have more or less completed the
FREE READER’S GUIDE, which is on my website. The reader’s guide is
like the commentary track on a DVD—I explain the literary allusions, add
references, make comments. It’s the book’s annotation. I had almost as
much fun writing the reader’s guide as I did writing the stories that make
up
Secret Lives. Go there now and read some of the secrets of
Secret Lives.

Keeping busy until Secret Lives comes out

I only allow myself to buy books and DVDs during even-numbered months.
On August 1, therefore—and before 8 a.m.—I opened the catalog whose pages
I’d been folding down for several days and logged on to its website. Click,
click, click. What did I order? The first thing I’d seen on the cover:
a book titled
Shakespeare’s Genealogies. It’s all the family trees of all the characters
in all forty-two plays. Wow! You really need that kind of resource when
you’re watching the history plays. I’ve got a bookmark in my Riverside
Shakespeare on the page with the family tree of Edward III, many of whose
descendants were fighting (on both sides of the Wars of the Roses) to gain
the English throne. The Wars of the Roses are really confusing. History
is complex. Even Shakespeare’s version of history is complex, and he was
writing a Tudor-approved version of history.

So I ordered the Shakespeare genealogies book, and then I ordered books
for my son and daughter-in-law for Christmas, but I won’t name them here
because my kids read this blog. Then I picked up another catalog and …
oh, goody!—
The History of the Pun. Anyone who’s read anything I’ve written,
especially
Finding New Goddesses, knows how much I like puns. Why shouldn’t
there be a serious study of wordplay? Click, click, click.




Then to Amazon and my shopping cart. First, I ordered a 1966 D’Oyly Carte
production of
The Mikado because I wanted to see the operetta in the Japanese costumes
and acting style that Gilbert and Sullivan themselves might have seen in
1885 when they wrote it. I’ve seen lots of
Mikados, of course, including one production that used the costumes
and sets that were used in
Topsy-Turvy, but my favorite is the English National Opera production
of 1987 starring Eric Idle (yes, the Monty Python Eric Idle) as Ko-Ko,
the cheap tailor turned into Lord High Executioner. This production isn’t
faux-Japanese; it’s 1930s English society with BBC enunciation. Nanki-Poo
sounds a lot like Jack Buchanan.




I also ordered Terry Pratchett’s newest Discworld novel,
I Shall Wear Midnight, and
The Annotated Archy and Mehitabel. The novelist in
Secret Lives who is
not me asks Madame Blavatsky, the talking calico cat, if she knew
archy and mehitabel and—




OH. YEAH.
SECRET LIVES. What I wanted was to be able to hold the book in my
hands on my birthday last month. That didn’t happen. Then I thought it
would be a book by mid-August. Well, Mercury is retrograde … so I’m working
(really hard) on going with the flow. I used to know a metaphysical teacher
who had her own little offset press that broke down every time Mercury
went retrograde. Mercury rules communications (among other things), so
writers need to be pretty careful during retrograde periods. Well, maybe
everyone does. Don’t get upset with stuff. Don’t insult people. Don’t start
fights. Be careful what you sign. Be nice to your computer.




I am therefore soldiering on. Last week, I put in two days reading the
semihemidemipenultimate pdf of the 650+ pages of the text. Tuesday—10 a.m.
to 10 p.m. Wednesday—noon until 8 p.m. Sherry had made all the changes
from the previous proofread, so I had fewer for her this time. As my authors
know (possibly all too well), I’m a Major Fussbudget, so I had more picky
changes (commas, niceties of phrasing) this time. When she made those changes
and sent me the next pdf of the text, I didn’t read the whole book again.
I just checked the changes. And sent her three more corrections.




She told me it was time to go to CreateSpace and set up my account. I
went to their website. Have I mentioned that websites make me crazy? What
is supposed to be “intuitive” on websites—including Facebook—for most people
isn’t for me. I just sit there. “Huh? What am I supposed to do now?” When
I phoned CreateSpace and the nice man asked about some little detail, I
couldn’t even answer him. I didn’t know what I didn’t know. So I phoned
Sherry. “I’m on the website and have no idea what to do.” She’s had a lot
of experience with CreateSpace. She calmly walked me through it, I sent
them a credit card payment, and
Secret Lives got its very own ISBN number (which numerologically
adds up to 7, the number of the scholar). I think the process I’ve just
been through is kinda like Janie’s menarche ritual and Marie’s croning—a
rite of passage into a new stage of life. Next Sherry and I talked about
the copyright page. We added credits for her and my daughter-in-law for
their good work on the book. Then I added urls. First, for the free rea—FREE
READER’S GUIDE (I decided uppercase will get people’s attention), which
will be on this website pretty soon. Second, for my
Facebook
Secret Lives page. Third, for this blog. I also updated my Facebook
page again.




And now I’m also pedaling as fast as I can to catch up with my editing.
What am I working on? A nice metaphysical book by an Austrian author who
currently lives in Italy and is trying to come back to Los Angeles. A Ph.D.
thesis by a graduate student at Lancaster University in England. This is
my fifth Ph.D. thesis from Lancaster in a row. The candidates just pass
me along. It’s lovely. BTW, Wallace and Gromit live in Lancaster, but I
don’t think they’ve been to the university. A long novel about world issues
encountered by the philosophical protagonist and his family as they build
a new business. A science fiction novel that I think is heading toward
being about the Sumerian gods. A witty book of astrology on the Lady Asteroids
(plus Chiron). A novel about a man who frees himself from the corporate
life and learns about cosmic mysteries. A history of Bolivia. A book about
fitness for which the authors coined the word “intensercise.” (It means
intense exercise.) Good for them! I love variety. I seem to have a lot
of it. My authors are all smart and interesting people.