Renée Harrell's Blog, page 4

Awful. Terrible. NO GOOD.

That’s just some of the things my fellow authors are saying about Amazon Vella. Kindle Vella?
 
​Well, some kind of Vella, fella.
 
I was so excited that Amazon had a serial fiction app coming that I shared my excitement with everyone. Harrell and I went full-in, too, disassembling our historical romance novel so that it would fit within Vella’s guidelines. Worked out pretty nicely, except for actual reader interest (I’ll talk about sales in a minute) and the story’s description.
 
In regards to the story’s description, Amazon limits their writers to “500 characters.” Not 500 words, that would be too easy. Five hundred characters. The description we’d prepared for the back of the upcoming paperback – in December – was way too long. After we shortened things, here’s what I wanted to use:
 
     “I’ve been corresponding with a gentleman in the West,” Deidre said. “When the train arrives in six days’ time, he’ll be at the depot. He’ll be waiting for his bride.”
     A sliver of orange biscuit escaped from Faith’s lips. “His – what?” 
    “His bride, his mail-order bride.” Deidre clapped her hands together. “Arriving on the train, traveling under my name, he’ll think you’re me, won’t he? Everyone will. The two of you can get married!”
     Faith choked on the remaining portion of biscuit.
 
Even if it didn’t say enough about the storyline, I found the dialogue intriguing. I’d want to see what happened next. But Vella descriptions are all crunchedtogetherlikethis, which is a miserable reading experience.
 
After much fussing, we went with this:
 
Faith Collins hopes her cat can forgive her. Having assumed another woman's identity, she's riding the nation's first transcontinental train in the hope of finding true love. Posing as a wealthy mail-order bride, she'll arrive at Harrington Station in a few days to meet her prospective groom. She doesn't know that the woman she's pretending to be has an enemy on the train -- or that he's plotting to kill both Faith and her beloved cat....
 
It's all right, I suppose. When  The Awful, Terrible, NO GOOD Mail-Order Bride  becomes a proper eBook, we’ll use our original paperback wordage and I’ll be happier. And, when that version launches, we might actually make a buck or two. Because Vella? So far, the most successful authors that I know aren’t seeing much in the way of returns. A low two-figure payout is the best I've heard. For that much money, they did everything that Harrell and I didn’t do. They notified their newsletter readers, they used every form of social media to inform their followers, they did giveaways and pumped their work as strongly as possible. They deserve the success that follows… except it isn’t following yet. This is a new experience for some of them.
 
For me, it’s old hat. When the story came out, I didn’t even tell you – and I like you. For writers who are used to seeing a flood of buys and good reviews? They’re shaken.
 
I know three people who are pulling their never-to-be completed serials from Vella. I had a casual acquaintance tell me that Amazon had “zero traction” among younger readers, and she was sorry she’d ever gotten involved with it. But here’s the thing: Vella isn’t even a month old. It’s in beta form, which appears to mean that Amazon hopes the format can learn to survive without any help. Of course, it’s going through some growing pains. Owning one of the biggest platforms in the world, Amazon isn’t using it to share the news about Vella with its customers. I’ve seen one advertisement on Twitter and that was just this morning.  
 
Why did they use Twitter? Amazon believes it appeals to a younger audience. Will a historical romance, like "Awful", appeal to a younger audience? That's not what we've seen in the past.
 
To date, our story has a few followers, no reviews, and I doubt we’ll see enough in royalties this year to buy a pair of fancy coffees at Starbucks. Not two fancy coffees with extra shots of expresso, that’s for sure. But our initial excitement about Kindle Vella – I just looked it up, that’s the official name, "Kindle Vella" – has helped us become familiar with serial fiction in general and a whole new writing world has opened up. I’m loving the new story we’re working on.
 
No money, but lots of fun? Yeah, not the worst trade.

Something's wrong with this picture.

​First of all, I’m in it. That’s all kinds of wrong.
 
I’m not fond of having my picture taken and neither is Harrell, which is one reason we have so few photos in the house. This time, for whatever reason, he wanted a cell shot of me holding one of the gourds I was about to purchase last week. In a moment of weakness, I agreed.
 
I blame the heat, the dirt, a touch of dehydration, and that fact that we were both bone-tired. It won’t happen again.
 
I’m posting this travesty of a shot because this may be the last time I pose for a photo. That’s a shame, not because I should be in more pictures, but because… it’s this photo. I admit, I’m not an expert when it comes to taking cell pics. Looking at this one, though, it feels to me as if the large gourd in the foreground could possibly have been removed or repositioned before the shot was taken. Maybe I could have been encouraged to step to one side or the other. Perhaps the photographer could have shifted a little before snapping the image.
 
Because, in my opinion, no one looking at this photo is going to focus on anything but the large phallic-looking gourd that’s centered at the lower part of my waist. The good news is, people won’t be looking at me. The bad news is, I could be wrong about that. People might be looking at the picture and thinking, why did that woman want that large phallic-looking gourd positioned at her waist?
 
Enough about that. Let’s move on.
 
Harrell and I have just returned from a long overdue visit with family and friends. We’ve missed those people for too long. We had the opportunity to attend a spectacular wedding that was held in a beautiful wooded setting, without any bears in sight. (This only became a consideration after a bear visited the three-story cabin we were in the night before.) Toward the end of our 11-day journey, we visited the Welburn Gourd Farm, famous for its thick-skinned gourds. You might not care about thick-skinned gourds, but gourders (it is, too, a word) go out of their way to find such prizes. I loaded the trunk of our rental car with gourds of all sizes, and felt very happy to have them, indeed.
 
We made it home safely, but that’s the end of the good news. Writing-wise, the bad news is that the Kindle Countdown Deal didn’t do anything to help us find new readers for The Runaway Mail-Order Bride. The novel rose a little in the Amazon rankings, but that’s because a couple of curious readers paid full price for the book. They didn’t return it for a refund, either, which is increasingly a problem for some of my fellow writers. Oh, yes, that’s become a thing. Less for us, though, than for others. Mail-order bride readers tend to be honorable folks.
 
And, then, there’s the Amazon Vella saga. I had such hopes. Instead, it’s been such a….
 
I don’t want to get into it at this moment. Next week, okay? I’ll tell all.

Another f***ing blog post.

Oh, please, don’t act as if you’re offended by the title. I did warn you about this last week.
 
Besides, those little asterisks could mean anything. There are buckets of four-letter words that could fill in the blank here. Foaming, for example. “Another foaming blog post.” Yes, it would make no sense, but why not? It’s not as if most of my blog posts make good sense.
 
When I went to WordHippo.com, they offered me nearly 200 options to fill-in this blank with four-letter f-words, all of which could be used in polite society, so if your mind went to a profanity-filled place when you saw the asterisks, then shame on you. But, also, congratulations, smarty-pants, because, this time, “f***ing” means exactly what you thought it did. The big F-word. A word I’ve rarely used in any of my writing.
 
Why bring it up today? I thought it was time I brought you up to date. If you remember, a couple of months ago in this very same space, I talked about trying my hand at writing a billionaire romance as a serial fiction. Financially, it seemed the way to go. With Amazon Vella launching this week, more people are reading serial fiction than ever; romance remains serial fiction’s most popular genre; and billionaire romance has been so popular the last several years that “billionaire” now qualifies as a romance sub-category on many of the most popular eBook distribution platforms.
 
As someone who is not a fan of billionaires, real or fictional, I find this astounding. In romances, billionaires are frequently lovelorn, brilliant, handsome, and sporting six-pack abs. They’re not as self-absorbed as real billionaires, and they don’t spend all of their time trying to make more money when they already have an obscene amount of wealth. They are pretend billionaires, which is exactly right for fiction.
 
It’s just that I have trouble separating the real billionaires that I read about (I’m looking at you, Elon and Jeff) from the adorable billionaires that exist in fantasy. In my opinion, there’s such a thing as too wealthy. When one person controls more money than the entire gross domestic output of a fair-sized country – say, Madagascar, GDP of $14B, population 27 million – something isn’t right. I might even say that it’s severely f***ed up. Elon and Jeff are probably glad I’m not in control of worldwide wealth distribution.
 
Since that’s how I feel, I didn’t believe I was the best candidate to pen a billionaire romance. But, then, I wrote on the May 4th blog, “out of nowhere, a new story title popped into my head.
 
I shared the name with G.W.
 
‘You can’t use that,’ G.W. told me. ‘It’s obscene!”
 
I didn’t share the title on that blog, but I’m doing so today. The name that grabbed me was, Another F***king Billionaire. I felt I could write that book if Amazon, the eBook distributor that provides most of the Anne Glynn royalties, was okay with profanity in book titles.
 
I shouldn’t have worried. It turns out, they are VERY okay with the F-word. Go to their site and you’ll find day planners, stage plays, novels and novellas that use the F-word as their primary marketing tool. You’ll see coloring books with the word in the title. Not all of the authors softened the word by using asterisks, either. They went full-frontal obscenity. Me and the Good Witch, we’re behind the times.
 
My partner and I forged ahead with a story outline. In the outline, the billionaire is brilliant, handsome, lovelorn, and sports six-pack abs. (We weren’t reinventing the wheel.) We went step by step, building a fantasy lover that met every expectation… until the very last pages of the story. At the very end of the tale, given an ultimatum, our amazing billionaire reacted in what we both considered to be a real-world fashion. Let’s just say, wedding bells don’t ring out.
 
The last line of our outline had the heroine saying, wearily, “Another f***king billionaire.”
  
I thought some readers would enjoy it, but a little doubt crept in. I took the outline to my writing group for their thoughts. Without exception, they all enjoyed the story until the clencher. They seemed united in the belief that readers who didn’t like billionaire romances wouldn’t read the story, while readers who did like billionaire romances would hate the wrap-up. Those readers might not feel very kindly toward the authors, either. We’d get a week of sales and a lifetime of one-star reviews.
 
It would be easy enough to change the ending. Easier still to file it away and continue working on our current project. Which is what we’ll probably do.
 
Probably.

The obscenities will have to wait until next week.

​I wrote a post for today’s blog yesterday and remembered, this morning, that I’d failed to do the marketing thing I meant to do earlier. Instead of trying to sell one of my books in last week’s blog, I was blowing air kisses to my Eufy RoboVac 30C. Promoting someone else’s product is not gonna pay for my ongoing manga addiction, if you get what I mean.
 
The blog I’ve written but can’t yet use is riddled with almost-obscenities. The words aren’t real obscenities, but close enough for guessing purposes. Why would I want to put such words in a PG-rated blog? I have my reasons. Just know that it’s not because I hope to be seen as edgy and cool or, as a younger friend told me, sick and dope.
 
When I grew up, no one wanted to be sick or a dope. But I digress. Come by in seven days, and you’ll hopefully see why I wrote what I wrote. H*ll, yeah!
 
All of which brings me to where we are at this moment. A couple of weeks ago, a woman in my local writer’s group asked me what I knew about Kindle Countdown Deals. Being edgy and cool, I replied, “Huh?”
 
Later that night, after I returned home, I did some studying. According to the Amazonians, a Countdown Deal “lets authors… run limited-time discounts for eBooks available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. Customers will see both the regular price and the promotional price on the eBook's detail page, as well as a countdown clock.”
 
I have a few novels that would benefit from a little promotion. The Runaway Mail-Order Bride is one of them. Once upon a time, it had done nicely. On the Amazon charts, it went to #2 in Victorian Historical Romance, #1 in Western Romance, and the resulting royalties kept the manga pages turning for more than a couple of months. However, that was seven years ago, a lengthy passage of time in the eBook biz. When I peeked in on the novel last Thursday, the numbers told a much sadder tale:
 
Best Sellers Rank: #1,352,074 in Kindle store#10,787 in Victorian Historian Romance (eBooks)#16,202 in Western Romance (eBooks) 
Let’s not pretend this is anyone’s idea of a “best seller.” I imagine the rank would be even worse if Runaway wasn’t in Kindle Unlimited, where KU members can download it for free.
 
I wondered how many eBooks are in the Kindle Store, but Amazon won’t tell. Author Derek Haines estimates there are between 6 and 9 million stories currently available, with another million being added every year. I’ve seen some other guesses at other 10 million available reads, with guestimations of over 30,000 new eBooks hitting Amazon every day. No wonder Derek tells writers that they’d better be prepared to do some marketing if they don’t want their words to vanish from sight.
 
The Kindle Countdown was easy to join and free when I did, so I dropped Runaway into the system and forgot to share the news until this morning.
 
Let me give you the scoop. From last Sunday until next Sunday, the price for Runaway Bride has been dropped from $4.99 to 99-cents. On the back of the paperback, the pitch goes like this:
 
She’d thought she’d met the man of her dreams. She couldn’t have been more wrong.
 
Donald’s letters had won her heart. Leaving everything behind, Lisa Hanlon is ready to start her new life as a sheriff’s wife. Her fiancé is attractive, influential, and eager to wed his mail-order bride. When she discovers that he’s also short-tempered, violent, and possessive, she flees for California, desperate to escape the man she’s promised to marry.
 
Arriving at a broken-down ranch in the middle of nowhere, Lisa is only seeking a place to hide. She’s dismayed to discover a rugged drifter, Pearce Folsom, in one of the outbuildings. Burdened with secrets of his own, Pearce hides the truth of his past, but he can’t hide his attraction to Lisa. When he steals a burning kiss in the middle of a midnight storm, Lisa knows this handsome cowboy wants more from her than she’s able to give. She can’t truly offer her love until she is finally and forever free from Donald.
 
And then, one terrible day. a telegram arrives: FOUND YOU.
 
Will this cost in price lift the book out of the million-plus sales ranks? I hope so.
 
How depressing will it be if it falls even further?
 

Nobody likes a complainer.

​That’s what a certain someone tells me, anyway. The Good Witch says this in the spirit of friendship, a little worried because some of my recent posts have been a bit on the negative side. This is exactly what I needed to hear, and this is why today’s blog is going to be so very positive and uplifting. Okay, maybe not uplifting; that’s a pretty distant horizon for a blog like this. And maybe not very positive, but it will be mostly positive.
 
That doesn’t mean I won’t express any quibbles today. I may mention, lightly and in passing, that my honey’s second pair of ridiculously-expensive Darn Tough Vermont socks has now blown a hole in one of its heels, too, but (positive, positive) what an interesting life lesson he has learned. He’d already learned similar life lessons about Arizona’s Greatest Hot Dogs and Tucson’s Best Pizza and many, many other things, but he remains dazzlingly receptive to empty promises. As one example, I promised to make a homemade supper this evening. Ha ha ha ha!
 
Nor will I grumble about the shoes that are pictured in the upper left-hand corner of this blog. These very colorful shoes were discovered when I was at a footwear emporium this week. I admit, I did a doubletake when I saw them. I took a picture to preserve the memory, then texted the photo to the Good Witch: So tempted to buy these shoes for the wedding, but the clown would miss them. When I saw them, I laughed at the price tag. And doesn’t everyone say that laughter is the best medicine? (Disclaimer: If you have a health condition that requires actual medicine, then laughter is not the best medicine. As an aside, do not taunt Happy Fun Ball.)
 
Let me tell you about a few things I like. One is the Dell laptop computer I’m using to type this blog. It was about as cheap a machine as Dell offers, cheaper still because I got it as a Black Friday deal, and I don’t care that it lacks all of the bells and whistles. It’s perfect for writing stories and doing internet research. Its biggest plus is that it’s not the HP laptop that it replaced, a several years-old curse which came loaded with bloatware. It harangued me constantly, pushing HP products that I learned to despise as the years trickled past. “Why won’t you die?” I asked it some months before I found the Dell. That’s when I realized one of us had to go.
 
Slid a little down the positivity scale there. Let me brush myself off and try again.
 
Another thing I like is Best Buy’s policy on recycling electronics and appliances for their customers. By the time 2021 had rolled around, they’d already recycled two BILLION pounds of electronics… including my miserable HP laptop. I asked if they could start the recycling process by driving a stake in its wee computer heart. Out of politeness, the salesman laughed. And doesn’t everyone say that laughter is the best medicine? (Disclaimer: If you have a health condition that requires actual medicine, then laughter is not the best medicine. As an aside, do not buy an HP laptop computer.) I also like this mug. I like it so much, I showed it to my very nice neighbors. They didn’t understand why I was a fan, but they smiled politely.
 
Finally, I think I’m starting to fall for my Eufy RoboVac 30. I got the Frisbee-shaped device because dust bunnies were inhabiting every corner of my living room. I felt I could either spend my time vacuuming or doing something I found more rewarding – which is, frankly, everything else except for making supper this evening. The machine boasts that it “Works with Wi-Fi”, which is swell, except that I don’t want it to work with wi-fi. Using wi-fi would require that I be involved. Since the robotic vacuum cleaner came with a remote control, I decided to use that, instead. Pushing “A” for Auto Clean, I left the machine to do its job on its own.
 
Without direction, without instruction, without any course to follow, it traveled about randomly on my tile floors. It wasn’t real loud, it wasn’t completely quiet, and it frequently repeated the path it was taking, kind of like me when I get distracted. I wasn’t hopeful. Rather than watch it fail at its task, I went online to check Eufy’s return policy.
 
Ninety minutes later, or so, the Frisbee had returned to its docking bay. The floors looked markedly better; the dust bunnies had fled. When I opened the machine’s dust collector, it was filled.
 
“Best Buy’s not getting its hands on you,” I told the RoboVac, reassuringly. Now, if only I could teach it to cook.

You know where it's really hot?

From what I’ve been reading, almost everywhere, apparently. But I haven’t been spending time in Portland, OR or Seattle, WA. I’ve been lounging about at the bottom of Arizona, sweltering.
 
The heat was worth it to see babies. Although, I must admit, I did check with my hostess to make certain her A/C was working again before I made the trip. I’m very happy to report, the air-conditioning unit worked very well – and almost constantly. The only time I realized the temperature had hit 113 Fahrenheit (45° Celsius) was when I went outside.
 
Consequently, I quit going outside.
 
If you’re wondering, as hot as it felt, this temperature is NOT hot enough to fry an egg on a sidewalk. According to Southern Living , eggs need to get up to 158 (F) to cook thoroughly and sidewalks top out at 145 (F). As a person, I’ve discovered that I top out at 113 (F). A couple of days ago, walking from my car to the house, I’m certain I cooked thoroughly.
 
On a side note, let me wish my USA-readers a wonderful Fourth of July this Sunday because July 4th is, of course, our country’s Independence Day… and “National Fry an Egg on the Sidewalk Day.” Like you, I’m amazed that I’m not kidding. In celebration of NFAEOTSD, Oatman, Arizona (population 43) holds a yearly egg-frying contest, bringing hundreds of tourists to the town, as well as a significantly smaller number of amateur chefs. As long as the contestants stay away from electricity or fire, they’re allowed to use whatever they like to produce their finest-looking fried egg.
 
Oatman, AZ has been doing this for 30 years. When they commit to a joke, they really commit. 
​

You know what has a short lifespan?

​From egg to larva to pupa to adult, a fruit fly’s life cycle runs about 10 days. They can last as long as fourteen days, but that’s only if they cut down on smoking, watch the alcohol, and exercise regularly.
 
Worker honey bees go for about six weeks before they give up the ghost, working themselves to death as they do almost all of the labor needed in their beehive. The queen bee, eating royal jelly and having lots of sex while the worker bees exhaust themselves, can live as long as five years. Let that be a lesson to you.
 
My guy’s Darn Tough Vermont’s “Men’s Stride Over the Calf Ultra-Lightweight Running Sock” – the ones with an unconditional lifetime guarantee – had a lifespan of less than three months. This corresponds roughly with the life cycle of the Beaver Pond Clubtail Dragonfly. One striking difference between the socks and the dragonflies is that my partner didn’t spend $71.52 for two pairs of flying insects under the assumption that they’d be in his sock drawer for the next twenty or thirty years.
 
I tried to warn him. I told him that Darn Tough’s “lifetime guarantee” didn’t guarantee that their socks would last a lifetime. It sounds like that’s what they’re promising, I agree, but it isn’t quite, is it? There’s some wiggle room there.
 
Although, c’mon, less than three months?
 
As you can see from the photo, one of the two pairs he purchased already needs to be replaced. (Also, as you can see from the photo, someone I know is never going to be a foot model.) Since the other pair of socks has survived to date while being worn once a week, maybe he just got unlucky and received a bum pair.
 
I hope so, because replacing these socks is more of a challenge than it needs to be. Here’s how it works: The unfortunate customer has to go online to submit a warranty claim. He or she has to document what was bought, where it was bought, and when it was bought. Then the paperwork has to be printed out, the (freshly-cleaned: it’s a rule) socks have to be put in a padded envelope or sturdy box, and then taken to the post office. The customer pays to send the socks to the Warranties Department and then waits to be notified that the socks were received. If that happens – it hasn’t yet – the customer picks a new pair and DVT ships it to them. Weeks will have passed.
 
A couple of thoughts here. Why does it matter when the socks were bought if there’s a lifetime guarantee? “It was bought within my lifetime,” would seem to be good enough. Why do the ruined socks have to go a padded envelope or sturdy box when they’d easily fit inside a regular manilla envelope without padding? Also, since it’s DVT’s shoddy merchandise that needs replacing, why aren’t they paying for return shipping?
 
You know what I believe? I think DTV want to make the process as much of a pain in the ass as possible to keep people from requesting replacement socks. I’ll bet it works, too, for a large part of the time. Not with my man. He might be a little gullible, but he hates to be taken for a sucker. If his future pairs of Darn Tough socks survive for as little time as the last one, he’ll be in line at the post office again… and again… and again… until the Warranties Department knows him on a first-name basis.
 
One way or another, those socks are gonna last him a lifetime.
 
Darn Tough of Vermont, you disappointed my guy. 

If you love your sofa, set it free.

​Temperatures are rising in this part of Arizona – I know, it’s June. What did I expect? – but, like the Phalaenopsis orchid , I don’t enjoy the heat. And… excuse me. Like the Phalaenopsis orchid, I’m easily sidetracked. So, let me take you down that particular track for a moment.
 
If you follow the link, it will take you to a site called JustAddIceOrchids.com. This website features a two-part article on “How Will Heat Affect My Phalaenopsis Orchid?”, which feels like one part too many. I am going to get to the gist of it right here ** Spoiler! Spoiler!**: your Phalaenopsis Orchid will not appreciate extreme heat. Or cold temperatures, either. It’s a picky thing, the Phalaenopsis Orchid. It wants to be kept between 65-85F, thank you very much.
 
While you are at the JustAddIceOrchids.com website, a pop-up will appear that says, Hi there! I’m Bertie the Plant Care Bot and I’m here to answer your plant care questions. You should know that Bertie is not a live person (Bertie has bolded this information so that visitors won’t get confused) and he won’t tolerate any foolishness with the questions he’s presented. You can’t ask, “Why doesn’t my Phalaenopsis Orchid return my texts?” or “Should I maybe dump my Phalaenopsis Orchid for that little heat-tolerant tramp, the Penstemon?”
 
These were the things I wanted to know, but Bertie wouldn’t let me ask. Such a robotic spoilsport.
  
Like a certain orchid I know, I thrive in moderate conditions and, yet, I was sweet-talked by a certain life partner and ended up in Arizona. During the months of June, July and August, no sane person in Arizona takes a long morning walk past 8:00 AM. As a result of this, me and my certain life partner get up WAY too early to take our morning stroll, up and down hills.
 
The other day, we found that someone had dragged a sofa out to curbside and was offering it, per the picture above, absolutely free. While we marched up the incline, and in the sofa’s general direction, my life partner said, “We’ve been wanting a new sofa.”
 
Never in my life had I told him, “I’ve been dreaming of getting a sad-looking curbside sofa to infest the living room. Do you think we’ll ever be lucky enough to find one?”
 
I told him, warningly, “It’s free.” His optimistic response was, “The best things in life are free.” With apologies to the Melbourne Ska Orchestra , what a crock.
 
Drawing closer, this is what we found: ​​​“What happened to the cushions?” my guy asked. "What are those stains?"
 
I knew what the stains looked like, but I didn't care to share. Then we trudged home and poured a couple of mugs of not-free iced coffee.
 
One last note: Although Amazon Vella has yet to launch, we’ve completed our first storyline for the service. Because serial fiction takes its cues from television, this is considered Season One. Forty-three episodes, nearly 70,000 words, and we’re very pleased with how it came together.
 
Once we can offer it to the reading public, the first three episodes will be… free.
 
You have been warned.

Never give up. Never surrender.

​I want to talk about the actor/writer/director Daniel Levy, then do a little humble-brag without the humble, and then I’ll go away. It won’t take long.
 
Dan Levy and his father, Eugene, are most recently known for having co-created a television show by the name of Schitt’s Creek. When the sitcom first appeared on Netflix, I avoided it like a televised plague. That title. (I almost called this week’s blog, Always give a Schitt’s, but decided against it. This was the right call.) I still wouldn’t have seen it if people we liked hadn’t kept saying it was funny, that we needed to watch at least one episode, so one day we did. A couple of days later, we saw another. The show was good-hearted and we sometimes laughed, and what else do you want from a sitcom? Harrell and I made it through season three before the thrill faded and we wandered off in search of other entertainment.
 
Three seasons of viewing any program is pretty good for this household. We enjoyed both seasons of Better Off Ted on Netflix, wished it had more episodes, but didn’t complain because we knew we wouldn’t have watched them. We had a great time with the first season of Stranger Things, heard that more episodes were coming, couldn’t find the enthusiasm to add them to the queue. When it comes to t.v. shows, I’m particularly fickle and my partner usually plays along.
 
Anyway, whether we made it to the end or not, we liked Schitt’s Creek. By extension, we liked the characters on it and the people who played them. So, when I read that Dan Levy was delivering the virtual commencement address to the Savannah College of Art and Design Class of 2021, I thought it would be worth a listen. He wrote a good show; maybe he knew how to write a good speech.
 
I couldn’t find the commencement address online (SCAD seems to have blocked it), but Bustle.com was able to provide a transcript of his closing words. It started with Dan saying, “The one thing that I would say is: follow through. That’s the greatest advice I could give because so few people actually do it.”
 
This struck a chord with me. Making promises is easy, but keeping those promises can be pretty tough. For example, I promised to do a weekly blog for an entire year even though people no longer read blogs and my life is not blog-worthy. It’s a deadly combination. Not wanting to disappoint Dan, I guess I’ll continue posting this blog for the 52 weeks I’ve promised.
 
This, by the way, is week #17. Yes, I’m counting.
 
Back to the transcript: Dan went on to say, “If you have an idea for something, in whatever form of the arts it is, if you have that painting you have in mind, and it gets tricky, and you are given that crossroads of ‘Do I give up on it or do I keep going?’ always keep going. If you’re a writer and you want to write a book, or a book of poetry, or a television show, or a movie and it gets a bit daunting and intimidating and you get that writer’s block, don’t give up on it. Because at the end of that experience, you will have something. Ninety-nine percent of the people out there have all the ideas in the world but never follow through on it.”
 
“Always keep going.” This is where Dan and I aren’t quite on the same page. What if someone knows they’re doing a lousy painting? I’ve done that. I was midway through a too-many-weeks painting and I knew it was only getting worse. I didn’t want to spend more days in an effort to finish that catastrophe. I gave up and started a different painting. I like how that one turned out.
 
And, although I no longer get writer’s block, thanks to something Nora Roberts once said, that doesn’t mean I’ve never given up on a writing project. I have a pair of half-finished manuscripts in a trunk in the garage. In one case, the story took a turn, I didn’t like where it was going, and I couldn’t get it back on-track without starting from scratch. I dumped it. In the second case, my life took a turn and I couldn’t get that back on track before I’d lose interest in what I was writing. I dumped that one, too. When I was able to come up for air, I wrote a different manuscript, instead.
 
That’s not all. I’ve spent more than a couple of hours today, trying to see how I was going to transition from Dan’s well-meaning but bad advice into my not-so-humble brag. I’ve tried all kinds of ways, and it’s just not coming together. According to D.L., I can’t stop in the middle of the thing and simply walk away. I have to keep pounding away at it, rewrite after rewrite, until some sad string of sentences finishes the thing. I don’t see how this benefits any one of us.
 
“Never give up, never surrender” appears to be the Levy family motto. (In our house, the family motto is, “We will gladly feast on those who would subdue us.”) Sometimes it is better to stop in the middle of something and walk away. If you stop and think about it, there is
 

I swear.

​Well, I do. Don’t you, at least on occasion?
 
When I’m with my brother or cousins, the people I grew up, I don’t watch the words I use. Frankly, on those occasions I can swear like a drunken sailor on leave. (This is not meant to imply that all sailors get drunk or swear while on leave. This is an unwarranted stereotype. The only reason I’ve used it is because (a) it’s easily understood by the people who read my words; and (b) I have it on good authority that there are no sailors who read my words. They’re too busy getting drunk and swearing.) My brother, cousins, and I learned a variety of swear words early in our lives, were rarely discouraged from using them when we were on our own, and we’re all quite comfortable giving our thoughts and opinions a special swearword-emphasis when the right occasion arises.
 
There are times when a good swear is indicated. It’s not satisfying to say something like, “Gosh, the darn toilet has backed up and sent poopy everywhere.” Harrell doesn’t speak nearly as colorfully as me, but even he wouldn’t say that. Consequently, when Harrell does release a swear word, it makes a real impact to the people around him. If the darn toilet was sentient and heard him cuss, it would refuse to release its poopy into the wild.
 
Now, if you were considering inviting me to the Royal Gala but this blog has given you second thoughts, you needn’t worry. I can be polite in social settings. I don’t even say, “Gosh”, to strangers unless I notice they have a plumbing issue.
 
As it happens, we avoid using Earth-based profanity when we write fiction. For Aly’s Luck, we used alien profanity liberally. It was fun, making up new and non-offensive swear words like “chund”. In our historical romances, even the bad guys rarely curse. People did curse in the good ol’ days, and they used most of the same swears that someone would hear today. That doesn’t seep into our stories, though. No one has ever asked us to censor our words; if they did, I’d color the pages blue with every obscenity I could think of. People haven’t, though. That’s just how we have chosen to write.
 
This might change in the near future.
 
I think it’s time to try something different. Tired of waiting for Amazon Vella to get going, we revamped one of our contemporary romances for submission to a different serial fiction app. (Serial fiction, as you’ll recall, are stories told in short installments and intended to be read on cell phones. The installments are released on a regular basis, one or twice or five times a week, with the most popular stories relying heavily on drama and cliffhangers.) This new take on an old story involved a change in perspective – Third Person to First, and that was an interesting experience – as well as an increase in romantic heat and a fresh boldness in the speech of our characters. In this “new” story, some of them speak like I do when I’m with my cousins. Except a couple of them want to have sex with one another.
 
I think it sounds right for the story. So does Harrell, and so does the editor who contacted us shortly before the Memorial Day holiday. If we like the contract they’re offering, we’re in.
 
Gosh darn it, I’m excited just thinking about it.
  
**Note: Jonathan Cooper of Unsplash provided Teddy’s image that’s above. Teddy’s shirt wasn’t blurred in the original photo. Thank you, Jonathan.