Michelle Garren Flye's Blog, page 12

It’s kinda funny, actually.

Yesterday I saw a sign that said “Live like someone left the gate open.” It summoned to mind a dog running like crazy, sniffing everything he’d never been allowed to sniff, peeing freely wherever he wanted. Yeah, it’d be nice to live life that way.

Today, I saw a meme of a sign that read “Whatever you do today, do it with the confidence of a 4 year old in a batman t-shirt.” And I thought, yes. That’s what I need to do.

I’m a writer.

That does not mean I’m famous.

The publishing world is not designed for people like me. I know this. I am nothing but a middle-class white woman who hasn’t had any real hardship in her life. There’s nothing remarkable about me to make me stand out from the crowd.

I am everywoman.

I can string words together, sometimes even brilliantly. I know the basic rules of grammar (don’t ask me about who/whom though) so I can edit my own work and there won’t be any egregious errors. I also have a pretty decent vocabulary—hence egregious.

I’m a good writer, but I’m still everywoman.

I remember how excited I was when my first book was published. It was a good little romance. I still think it is. I’ve gone back and re-read it without flinching. Much. It was traditionally published by an ebook publisher. In fact, it came out in July 2010. It’s been out for thirteen years.

I’m still not famous.

Since 2010, I’ve had two more traditionally published ebooks (both romance). But I have self-published ten romances, a romantic fantasy trilogy, two children’s books, a young adult book, a comic book, and most recently, seven books of poetry.

Somebody left the gate open.

So here I am, a self-published, relatively unknown writer, frolicking along on the roadside where I’m not supposed to be, publishing books like I’m a 4-year-old who believes fiercely that I can become a superhero—or at least pee anywhere I want to. To make it even better, I now own a bookstore and I try my best to encourage people to try other writers than those embraced by the publishing world.

Because there are more stars out there than those you see at first glance. Some of us just aren’t given the opportunity to shine.

Are you sure you wish to hear my tale? It’s really only about me.

From “Han River” by Michelle Garren-Flye

Just a dandelion, really. Photo by Michelle Garren-Flye. Copyright 2023

It’s…scary.

I won’t lie. Instagram Lives are not my thing. It’s disquieting thinking strangers could be listening to me. It’s even more nerve-wracking thinking one of my friends could be on there. In fact, if I’m looking at the screen, I’ll see who’s watching.

It’s very different from recording myself reading poetry and putting it up. That live feedback is sort of shocking.

Why is it different from a live audience? I mean, I’m terrified of those, too, but somehow the online lives are worse. I guess it’s the faceless aspect of it. I have no idea if you’re laughing or crying or bored or even sleeping. Whatever’s going on on the other end of the Instagram line is a mystery to me.

All I can do is present the poetry I wrote as best I can and hope you like it.

At 11 a.m. Sunday.

Today I’m drawing yellow. Is it love or just spring?

From “Today I’m Drawing Yellow” by Michelle Garren-Flye

Photo by Michelle Garren-Flye. Copyright 2023

It’s Free!

Forget my complicated relationship with Amazon for a bit. Right now, as we speak, my new book of love poetry, Where the Sidewalk Begins, is totally free for your Kindle. It’ll be that way until Sunday, and on Sunday at 11 a.m. I’m going to go live on Instagram and read parts of my book.

Which means if you want to read the book and request a poem to be read, you can do it.

Or you can read the book and ask me questions about it.

So you got some homework to do, and actually, so do I. Because I have a mind like a steel…tablespoon. It fills up quickly and stuff sloshes out. So the poetry I wrote and carefully selected and formatted and made into a book might have been forgotten by now, lol. And definitely any inspiration behind it. l

Tomorrow I’ll talk a little about why I’m a bit scared of the idea of going live. And why I’m going to do it anyway.

Dare I take that first step, feel heel strike hard stone, face the rest of my life…alone?

From “Where the Sidewalk Begins” by Michelle Garren-Flye

Photo by Michelle Garren-Flye Copyright 2023

It’s Complicated…

Last year one of the local bars held a singles meet-and-greet where people were given their choices of cups. Red for in a committed relationship, green for available and yellow for “It’s complicated.”

I was interviewed for a local television news story last week. If you’d like to watch it, you can here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5Rr4vjwxjk&t=15s. The reporter was young, enthusiastic and very, very capable. I admired her. She asked me a lot of insightful questions about bookselling. One of those questions was something like how did I feel about Amazon.

I’m not sure I answered her question very well, because, to be honest, my relationship with Amazon requires a yellow cup.

It’s complicated.

As a bookseller, do I resent Amazon? Not really, honestly. Amazon fulfills an entirely different purpose from what I do. I order supplies for my store from Amazon because I can find good deals, compare products easily and, quite honestly, it makes my life easier. At the end of the year, for instance, when I need to find receipts, it’s much easier if everything is on Amazon instead of a few here and a few there.

Does Amazon affect my business? Again, that’s complicated. I mean, yeah, probably. I don’t know what it was like being a bookseller before Amazon, though. And I don’t sell new books, at least not new bestsellers. I sell used books and local authors. And no, Nicholas Sparks isn’t one of “my” authors lol. My authors sell their books here at the store on consignment, which means if the books sell, they get a check.

Now, that brings me to a more interesting question. As a local author who publishes her books and sells them on Amazon’s self-publishing platform KDP, how do I feel about Amazon?

If I cared enough to dig into my true feelings about it, I’d probably resent them more. Their algorithms often hide independent authors like myself. The pitiful amount of royalty I receive from each sale on Amazon takes a while to add up to a measurable sum. I have tried their “marketing”, but it amounts to giving away books or paying more for each purchase due to empty “clicks” than I get from the sale.

Still, Amazon is exceedingly fair in their pricing for author copies and their system is incredibly easy to use. I currently have twenty-six personal titles on my KDP Bookshelf, and I have also used KDP to publish all the literary magazines for my store. When I am asked for advice on how to self-publish, I send authors to Amazon without a single qualm.

I got a little sidetracked with this post. I started out to tell you Where the Sidewalk Begins, my book of love poems, is now available on Amazon in Kindle, paperback and hardcover. But I got distracted thinking about my feelings. Anyway, starting tomorrow and running through Sunday, Where the Sidewalk Begins is FREE on Kindle. And on Sunday at 11 a.m., I’m going to do another live poetry reading from the book.

I dreamed I fell in love with none other than the moon…

from “Wow” by Michelle Garren-Flye

Photo by Michelle Garren-Flye Copyright 2023

Are We Afraid of New Stories?

J.K. Rowling said, “There’s always room for a story that can transport people to another place.”

But is there? J.K. Rowling herself has become an icon of what I think of as “Cancelhood” by expressing an opinion that was not popular among…who? Twitterers? Gen Z? I don’t even know. But they “canceled” her so they have as much power as the men in black, the alternative state, the dark government.

The Cancelers.

I’m digressing a bit. I’m worried about storytelling. I’m worried we are no longer open to new ideas. Are there any new ideas?

It’s not a totally new thing that we are more comfortable with the stories we know. Look at how old Cinderella is. Is there anyone who doesn’t know that story in one iteration or another? We may all think of the Disney version, or the more educated may even know Charles Perrault’s version, but the story goes back much further in Greece and Asia.

Women have been losing shoes for freaking forever, man.

And bored royal men have been fetching them for us.

I’d never thought of Cinderella as a women’s empowerment tale until just now.

But again, I digress. I saw a news report today about the spectacular failure of Pixar’s latest movie (probably only spectacular failure because it was Pixar and Pixar is supposed to not fail). The report went on to examine the current hits, all of which are sequels, remakes and adaptations featuring familiar characters.

I’ve been watching a lot of Korean television recently. “K-dramas” as we Americans call them, aren’t necessarily new stories (they’re mostly soapy love stories or about lawyers or doctors—very familiar territory), but they are told from a different point of view in a different setting, sometimes in very unique ways. (I’m looking at you, “Extraordinary Attorney Woo”!)

The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic slice of truth, wisdom, is dying out.

Walter Benjamin

I hope that’s not true. It’s definitely getting harder to tell new stories as the routes of communication are closing in on themselves. Disney owns Pixar and ABC, FOX owns CNN, let’s not even get started on the lack of publishing houses. It’s easier for the megacorporations to churn out more and more of the same stuff the public has consumed for years. But in doing so, they’re taking away the superpower of communication, stripping away mankind’s ability to see beyond what is to what could be.

As storytellers, maybe it’s up to us? Find a way to make stories that are new but introduced in a familiar way. Or a way to tell old stories in a very new way. Maybe we have to risk being canceled to break through walls now. Maybe we have to tell stories that aren’t comfortable to hear or read.

Maybe we need to lose a shoe and see who brings it back to us?

Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can’t remember who we are or why we’re here.

Sue Monk Kidd

My book of “love poems” will be available soon. Copyright 2023 Michelle Garren-Flye

Spoiler 3: Where the Sidewalk Begins update

I’ve been super busy working on Where the Sidewalk Begins. This book is a new start for me in a lot of ways, so I’m taking my time and making sure it’s exactly what I want it to be. I’m really loving the way each block is coming together in the bookbuilding process.

Here’s a tiny large spoiler for you. The illustration is my favorite from the book. The quote is from one of my favorite poems in the book. Of course, I’m trying to only include my favorite poems in this book, but you get it.

Copyright 2023 Michelle Garren-Flye

I Promised Spoilers

I haven’t really followed through, have I? I’m close to having Where the Sidewalk Begins ready, but I’ve only done one spoiler! lol. I’m sure you’re all hanging in there waiting for each one, right?

Appropriately, I pulled today’s “spoiler” from a poem titled “Echoes in a Fangirll’s Heart”, inspired mostly by David Bowie, with a small nod to Stray Kids (if you’re not familiar with them, check them out).

I hope you enjoy. And I hope you’ll stick with me for another month or so when I’ll have the book finished!

Spoiler #2. Copyright 2023 Michelle Garren-Flye

For Mama

I didn’t post yesterday for Mother’s Day. The reasons for this were numerous. For one, I was extremely busy. For another, I was torn between being happy my kids were all home and spending time with me and sad that for the first time in my life, I didn’t have a mother to call.

I used to write poetry for my mother. When I was a little girl, she was, in my eyes, the most beautiful woman in the world. She later became my best friend, my sounding board for life decisions. When I was in college, “long distance” fees on phone calls were still a thing, so we limited ourselves to one call a week to catch up. It became a tradition that lasted well into my married life when the children were small and past the point where “long distance” wasn’t a problem anymore. I continued to make those calls even when she began refusing to speak on the phone, always hoping to hear her voice, just for a moment.

I found a voicemail on my phone. It’s about three years old from the time before she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. I’ve listened to it once and saved it on my phone and sent it to my brothers. That voicemail is precious to me even though I can’t bear to listen to it. The guilt is real, still. What was I doing that I couldn’t answer the phone? Did I call her back?

Didn’t I realize I wouldn’t have her forever?

And because this is my first Mother’s Day without my mother, yesterday was, I guess, a sort of poet’s moment of silence. But now I want to share. Here’s my beautiful Mama, probably taken on a past Mother’s Day.

What I’ve Been Doing

I know, I spend an entire month on here giving you a new poem (or something) every day, then I disappear for more than a week. I have been working and planning, though. My next book, Where the Sidewalk Begins (with apologies to Shel Silverstein), must be published! I revealed the cover at the end of April. Now I’ve begun planning the shape of the book itself.

I have (thanks in large part to April’s poem a day) enough love poems to make a book. It took me a while to decide how to illustrate it, though. I believe I’ve settled on the look I want. So, from now until I publish the book, I’m going to give you a “spoiler” image with a quote from one of the poems at least once a week. This will keep me working steadily. I’m hoping to have an illustration for each poem, so 50 poems, 50 illustrations, but it might end up being half that many. We’ll have to see.

Anyway, here’s “spoiler #1” for the poem “Where the Sidewalk Begins”.

Copyright 2023 Michelle Garren-Flye

Day 30: Happy National Poetry Month!

It’s bittersweet this ending of National Poetry Month. This one, more than many others, has meant a lot. I’m happy it’s over, but sad at the same time.

I’m happy because I have a lot of material to work with when I got to put together Where the Sidewalk Begins. I’ve written some good stuff, some decent stuff, some stuff that needs work. It’s going to be interesting to see how it comes together.

I’m sad because I enjoyed the pressure of writing a poem a day. Why can’t I continue that after this month? Well, because it’s a bit of a pain in the ass. I mean, look at just the past few days. I’ve been sick, I’ve been trying to get caught up at work, I’ve had two big events this weekend. And every day I either had to write something poetic or do an Instagram live.

Speaking of the Instagram live, I do realize I owe you one of those. I promise to do it soon. As I mentioned before, I’ve been sick and I don’t really look great right now. So I decided to take today off and just write another poem instead.

So here’s the last poem of National Poetry Month 2023. Thank you for joining me this month.

Symphony in My Head
By Michelle Garren-Flye

Today I hear flutes playing
…not in the distance…
No, they’re inside my head.

Trumpets kick in a blaring note
…make me start a bit…
But they’re not the only ones.

A harp, a violin, a trombone or two
…is that an electric guitar?...
It’s a full-blown symphony up there.

The drumbeats start and I have to move
…what other choice do I have?...
I’ll dance along, keep time with their song.

Oh, it’ll keep me going all day long
…the rhythm, the flow, the beat…
How I love this symphony in my head!
Working cover for Where the Sidewalk Begins. Hope you’ll check it out when it’s done!
Copyright 2023 Michelle Garren-Flye