Phillip T. Stephens's Blog: Wind Eggs, page 2

Waging Peace: The BeZine Returns

Fans of The Bezine haven’t seen it for a while. Jaime Dede’s volunteer online journal devoted to spirituality decided to shift publication to quarterly releases. This will allow them time to recuperate and most likely improve the content. The wait ended with their March release, featuring Michael Dickel’s defense of activist poetry, beattitudes and poetry by Wendy Brown Baez, Paul Brookes and Edward Lee.

Oh, and me too.

[image error] The March 2018 issue of the BeZine celebrates the act of waging peace.

Don’t miss this landmark issue dedicated to the theme of Waging Peace.

SaveSave

Optimizing Your Books for Amazon Keyword Search

Creating keywords for your books looks easy the first time out. You wrote a mystery, so you add “mystery,” “suspense,” “thriller,” and maybe “whodunit” or “humor.” Only nobody buys your book. Then someone in a chat mentions the difficulty of optimizing your key word search, or even optimizing your book.

[image error]Optimizing for Amazon’s search engine can make a quintuple word score seem easy.

You spend seven hundred dollars on a workshop, and come out just as clueless.

Jane Friedman offers a few beginning tips to pursue before you commit your money and time.

Optimizing Your Books for Amazon Keyword Search

Book Reviews

    

check out my books at Amazon.com


[contact-form]

SaveSave

I Was Abducted by Aliens and All I Got for My Trouble Was Couples’ Therapy

or, What Do You Mean by “Tongue in Cheek?”
Another installment in my series “I was abducted by aliens in a former life.”
[image error]After an abduction experience, couples often feel the alien coming between them. In Art & Hester’s case, the feeling wasn’t metaphorical.

Last spring I was asked to write the the dialogue for a re-enactment on the Austin Public Access show, Real Life Pillow Talk: Case Studies in Sexual Disfunction. I interviewed Art and Hester (names changed at their request) at the producer’s request and based the dialogue on their recollections of several conversations. The episode never aired. The show’s grant money was pulled after the first two episodes.

Because I felt readers might beneift from Art and Hester’s experience, I decided to make it public.

You can find the complete transcript at The Creative Cafe:

I Was Abducted by Aliens and All I Got for My Trouble Was Couples’ Therapy

 

Book Reviews

    

check out my books at Amazon.com


[contact-form]

Looking for Indie Reads? Try CQ’s List

This weekend CQ International released editor Paul White’s list of indie books to read in the upcoming year. The List includes fiction, children’s books, poetry and historical reporting. Authors include Karen Mossman, Andrew Pelaquin, Rika Inami, Patrick Parker, SM Soto (and even me).

 

[image error]CQ International provides readers with a list of indie books to read this year.

If you’re looking for a good indie read, look to The List for Paul’s suggestions.

Book Reviews

 |  |  |

check out my books at Amazon.com

[contact-form]

SaveSave

Festivities, Families and the Art of Pressing Flesh

A Christmas Story

Stories of family conflict during holidays are as common as stories of family joy. The drunk uncle, the flatulent aunt, the overcooked turkey, the child who vomits in the living room after eating a box of candy canes and running in circles. At the moment when stress builds like lava in a volcano, your brother mentions Obama or Trump, or, even worse, religion. So readers might forgive Kristin and Isaac for their distress when his brother arrives unannounced.

[image error]Some family members knew it was best to come armed.

Kristin drew her shades. Powdered sugar snow drifted across her lawn. A car idled in front of the house, exhaust fleeing upward and vaporizing like ghosts of winters past. Snow covered the windows, blocking her view of the couple in the car.

The snow couldn’t hide the mismatched fenders of the gas-swilling land boat, the kind driven by lower level gangsters on The Sopranos. It shuddered on its frame with epileptic seizures. Every few seconds the exhaust pipe coughed a black cloud.

She hoped they were checking their map.

Read the story at…

Festivities, Families and the Art of Pressing Flesh

SaveSave

A Miracle Is What You Make It

A Christmas Fable

This Christmas I published two holiday stories for my readers. The first, published by Lit Up magazine offers a morality tale in the season’s spirit:

“Go away,” Robbins said. “We expect an important guest” (Wikimedia)

“Snow swept through the mountains and streets of Pinkepinke on Christmas Eve. The first snow after a freezing fall without rain. It fell in thick patches, like fairies dancing in the cerise and cerulean sunset. In any other country families step outside to celebrate the season with carols and clasped hands.…”

Read more at…

A Miracle Is What You Make It

SaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSave

Last Minute Christmas Cards with iOS apps

Her kids’ friends pounded the stairs of her house. Our sister was running back and forth in a dither trying to get her new house ready. Her dinner plans for the family fell through.

My sister Aimee sat down to take a breath and glance through her mail. That’s where she found three Christmas Cards from people who she’d forgotten this year.

Carol and I long ago gave up Christmas cards because we couldn’t keep up with the stress of tracking everyone. But my sister’s a Dallas woman. They’d never allow that to happen.

Fortunately, I had a solution. Make-your-own cards in a few minutes with iPhone or iPad apps. How quickly you make them depends on how picky you are and how much you want to learn the features, but I downloaded these apps for the first time and created a card in less time than it took to write this blog.

[image error]BeCasso and Art Card allow you to add artistic effects to photos or images from your library.

BeCasso and ArtCard are the same app, but ArtCard works on your iPhone and reamed some of the effects that create Christmaslike images (so you might get, “Santa” instead of “Monet”). You also have less control over the way the effect is applied to the image. Both apps let you can add an image from your photos, your library or even from a link to Pixabay’s public domain images collection. When you finish you can have a printed card sent from the developer’s service for two dollars, or you can send the image by email or social media.

If you have both iPad and iPhone, I’d recommend BeCasso. Otherwise, your device dictates which app you’ll download. Neither cost anything, although the developer asks for a donation.

I don’t like to send cards without a message, so I export the image to my library and import it into a photo text app. The best I’ve found for cards is Write Behind. The developers let you download it free, but charge five dollars to remove their large and annoying watermark from the images. For another dollar they throw in their suite of additional editing tools. I think it’s worth the six dollars, mainly because the type library is huge, it’s easy to add text, and you can paint out text that hides areas of the image you want to keep (professionals call this “masking”). It’s a cheap way to get effects that cost a lot more in other apps.

[image error]Write Behind adds text to your image. You can then erase pieces to make it “hide” behind your image.

If you want to send a printed card, you can import the image with the message back into BeCasso and send it. Or you can forward it by email or social media through Write Behind.  Either way, six dollars and ten minutes of your time is far more convenient than running to the store, buying cards and mailing them.

Book Reviews

 |  |  |

check out my books at Amazon.com


[contact-form]

Learning from the rich imagery of surrealism…

We often forget surrealism’s rich history in art and literature during an era where the fantastic dominates the box office and best-seller lists. Surrealist artists combine the fantastic with the ordinary to challenge their audience’s everyday assumptions. Unlike popular literature of the fantastic, surrealists made non-sequitur the central element of the fantastic.

[image error]None of these paintings present a coherent view of our world. Surrealism embraces non-sequitur.

In popular art, the marriage of the fantastic and the ordinary makes sense within the storyline. Thor, for instance, only comes to earth because the scriptwriters built a bridge between Asgard and earth. The yellow sun fuels Superman’s powers. Neither of these contrivances would be convincing in a science class, but they hold up within the story.

Surrealism ignores logic, cause and effect, and even the need for consistency. Embracing surrealism frees the right brain from the control of the left brain and allows our minds to explore closets within our imagination that make no sense to the rational mind.

Bridget Whelen introduces readers to Remedios Varo’s 1955 painting Sympathy. Notice how the cat and woman connect by touch, sharing color and fur as though each flows from the other. But they also connect symbolically through symbols and expressions caught within a web of imagination. To the side, the liquid from the spilled glass could be taking human form, or it could simply be a random shape, like a cloud sculpture. (It also balances the picture). Donald Barthelme used surrealism often in his work, as did William S. Burroughs. Surrealist images suffuse through the Spanish literature of the twentieth century. Hitchcock hired painter Salvatore Dali to paint the sequences involving Ingrid Bergman’s unconscious thoughts.

Note how the woman and cat connect to each other and from their personal connection to a world spiraling into chaos.

Explore ways in which you can draw inspiration from Varo’s painting for your own work.

Learning from the rich imagery of surrealism…

SaveSave

SaveSave

The Life of the Spirit

In this season of peace, we should take a break from spending and reflect on the life of the spirit. This month’s Christmas issue of The BeZine is a perfect start.

[image error]

The Life of the Spirit

SaveSave

Why Is the Oxford Comma a Heated Debate in 2017?

Grammar rules change daily. We learn about them two years later. If we’re lucky. Fortunately, we can keep track of those changes by using a style book.

Sometimes we have to switch style books. An academic journal that publishes my work only accepts manuscripts in Chicago Manual of Style. I didn’t think it was a big switch until I realized the Chicago Manual disagrees with the Associated Press on comma usage. Changing habits that go that deep is difficult.

If it surprises you that style rules depend on who dictates them, and the publication that adopts them, you don’t understand the history of language. The first standardized English dictionaries weren’t compiled until the eighteenth century. It’s only been within the last 150 years that we’ve tried to standardize American grammar.

[image error]The Oxford requires a comma before the last item in a list longer than two. For instance derby, mustache, and umbrella.

In spite of what your English teacher may have told you, we never succeeded. The rules are as fluid as language and some, like the comma (especially what is known as the “Oxford comma”), are never resolved.

Grammerly recently updated readers on a number of style book updates, one of which is not the Oxford comma.

Why Is the Oxford Comma a Heated Debate in 2017?

SaveSave